Leif Erikson
"Leif set sail when he was ready; he ran into prolonged difficulties at sea, and finally came upon lands whose existence he had never suspected. There were fields of wild wheat growing there, and vines, and among the trees were maples." - The Saga of Erik the Red
Despite what some textbooks might try to teach you, the Vikings actually discovered North America 492 years before that slacker Christopher Columbus ever set foot in the West Indies. Even better, they weren’t deluded into mistakenly believing they’d accidentally discovered India or China or whatever Columbus thought he’d bumped into – they knew that they were in a new, previously-undiscovered land never before seen by European settlers. That this was some new location, with new lands to explore, new resources to harvest, and plenty of fascinating new people to engage in brutal hand-to-hand combat.
And, I mean, if the idea of a gigantic, bearded Viking berserker in chainmail armor charging a ferocious Beothuk warrior brave in full war paint doesn’t get your blood churning into overdrive I’m not really sure I can help you here.
The story starts back in Greenland, right around the time that our old friend Erik the Red was conning a bunch of gullible Vikings into relocating their families to an ice-encrusted island in the middle of nowhere, for no other reason than because he’d been banned from both Norway and Iceland because he just could not stop murdering his neighbors with a gigantic fuck-off axe. The average temperature in Greenland is about four degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, and there were plenty of sustained twenty mile per hour winds and enough yearly snowfall to bury your house. Well, apparently some guy named Bjarni Herjolfsson thought this sounded just stellar and decided he should go visit his dad in Greenland, but as he was making the 450 mile trip from Norway through the North Sea he got blown off course and ended up finding some huge uncharted huge land mass covered with trees and sand and things. Realizing this wasn’t the desolate miserable wasteland he was expecting to find, Bjarni figured he’d made a wrong turn somewhere, so he cranked the e-brake on his longship, popped a U-turn, landed in Greenland, found his pops, and was basically just like, “I guess I found some other new land or whatever but who cares because hooray for Greenland, right folks?”
When Bjarni told his story to Erik the Red, Erik’s young son Leif was pumped. Like, super pumped up out of his mind.
Leif Ericsson pretty much thought about this new world every day for like the next 15 years, dreaming about having the opportunity to win glory by discovering something important, and then celebrating his intrepidness by laying out on the beach working on his tan. When he was finally old enough, Leif tracked down Bjarni Herjolfsson, had coffee or whatever with him, and asked Bjarni to tell him everything about his voyage. Bjarni gave Leif a general idea of where this land was, and Leif was so on board with it that not only did he buy Bjarni’s ship from him, he also went out and hired several members of Bjarni’s old crew so they could help guide him.
So, finally, in the nice round-numbered year of 1000 AD, Leif Ericsson assembled a crew of 30 or so rowers and explorers, loaded them into Bjarni’s old ship, dusted off his trusty compass, and prepared for the adventure of a lifetime. Leif offered to let his dad Erik the Red lead the expedition, but as Erik was riding out to the dockyards he fell off his horse and was like, “yeah forget it, I think I’m too old for this stuff anyways.”
Battling freezing wind chills, terrifying storms, mighty waves, and every other horrible, ship-crushing hazard the ocean has to offer, all while rowing by hand in an open-top ship that wasn’t really designed for this sort of thing, the daring explorer Leif Ericsson plowed forward into unknown waters, first sailing all the way up the coast of Greenland and then making a sharp left turn, heading out into the frigid sea without any point of reference whatsoever. He travelled West for what seemed like an eternity, waves tossing his small ship around. He was determined to find the semi-mythical land of his dreams or die trying.
Then, after several days, he saw it. Off in the distance, on the western horizon.
Land.
He’d done it. Totally freaking out with excitement, Leif ordered his sails raised and his crew to row as hard as they could towards this strange, puzzling land mass. From this point on he became known as Leif the Lucky, because he was considered pretty lucky to not have sailed off the edge of the earth into the gaping jaws of some horrible Viking-eating fictional sea monster.
When he Leif got thereto shore, he became the first European to set foot in the New World – an achievement that wouldn’t be duplicated for almost five centuries. Standing triumphantly on what we know today as Baffin Island, Canada, Leif the Lucky struck a sweet pose and surveyed the landscape before him.
He quickly determined that this place was terrible. He named it Helluland, meaning “Slab Land”, because it was truly just a flat, barren cesspit of ice and rock with nothing to offer him whatsoever.
But Leif the Lucky wasn’t done. He got in his ship, turned South, and continued exploring the inlets and bays of the North American coast until he found something worth discovering.
The second place Leif reached was much nicer. Arriving in present-day Labrador, Canada, Leif cleverly named the region Markland, meaning “Wood Land”, because, uh, it had a forest there. He also found his sandy beaches, went for a nice long walk, then decided, okay, that was fun, now let’s get out of here.
He continued south. And this time he hit the jackpot.
Leif the Lucky had finally arrived in a place that was worth discovering. Green meadows, a lush maple forest, beaches, warm weather, deer, rabbits, rainbows, and all kinds of other great things waited for him. If that wasn’t enough, as his crews were exploring the land, a guy named Tyrker the German wandered off through a forest and accidentally discovered a huge patch of wild grape vines. This was such a big deal that not only did Tyrker the German start being known as Tyrker Grape-Finder, but Leif, in his typical Leif Ericsson fashion, named the region Vinland, which (as you can probably guess) means “Vine Land”. It was so rad that Leif decided to stay there for the winter. He and his men built turf houses, a smithy, a lumber yard, a dock to fix their ship, and even a sauna to relax their tired rowing muscles. The Vikings picked a ton of grapes and made their own wine, which was huge for them because grapes don’t grow in Scandinavia, and usually any time the Vikings wanted a nice bottle of fine wine they had to burn a Frankish monastery to the ground and pry it from the hands of a Catholic monk.
After spending the most pleasant winter of his life chilling in Vinland, Leif and his men sailed back to Greenland and told everyone what went down. They were welcomed home as heroes, but there was also some bad news – Erik the Red was dead, and now everyone was looking to Leif to lead them as Jarl of Greenland. It was a responsibility Leif couldn’t refuse. He would never return to the New World again.
That didn’t stop his family from taking up the reins and exploring Vinland further, however. Three more expeditions would make their way to the New World, each with varying degrees of success. First was Leif’s brother Thorvald, who landed first at Vinland, and then possibly headed south to a second site. These early Viking explorers quickly realized, however, that the land they'd just discovered was already inhabited by indigenous peoples. The Vikings didn’t know what to call these tomahawk-slinging natives with the war-painted faces, so they called them came up with Skrellings, which was really just the default word the Norse used for fairies, elves, and pretty much anything they couldn’t identify.
Well, these Skrellings decided they weren’t huge fans of having Viking raiders running around “discovering” the land they’d been living on for several hundred/thousand years, so they put together a war band and made a concerted attempt to forcibly evict Thorvald and his buddies by bludgeoning their faces inside out. Thorvald was killed by an arrow to the gut, becoming the first European to die on North American soil, and his buddies ran for it back to Greenland.
The next journey was undertaken a few years later by Thorfin Karlsfeni, a Norwegian trader who married Thorvald’s widow. Thorfin made an attempt to create a permanent settlement in Vinland, bringing a hundred or so men and women to Leif’s camp and living there for three winters. While he was there his wife Gudrid gave birth to their son Snorri, the first European kid born in the New World. Thorfin tried to make nice with the American Indians (probably either MicMacs or Beothuks), trading them milk and red cloth for furs and other items, but a mutual distrust, a dire shortage of red cloth, and the lack of any means of meaningful communication besides hand signs and funky dance moves eventually led to a series of battles between axe-swinging Vikings and hardcore natives. Thorfin, with limited manpower, no supply lines, and no reinforcements, had to bail.
By the time the fourth Viking expedition to Vinland went down, the American Indians had seen enough. Not long after arriving, the Vikings were just looking for grapes, when all of a sudden out of nowhere these Skrellings came flying in from every direction, attacking with slings, axes, and other stuff. The Vikings started hauling outta there at top speed, but one of the Norsemen decided to make a stand and test the Skraellings’ mettle: Freydis Ericsdottr, Leif's permanently-angry axe-swinging sister, who, by the way, was super pregnant, insanely mad, and didn’t feel like running away from anything. She faced the fleeing Vikings and shouted:
"Why do ye run, stout men as ye are, before these miserable wretches, whom I thought ye would knock down like cattle? If I had weapons, methinks I could fight better than any of ye!"
Look, as I’m writing this my wife is 8.5 months pregnant, and when she starts looking like this I can’t imagine any army in the world that wouldn’t break and flee.
This didn’t even slow the fleeing Vikings down, so Freydis took matters into her own hands. She grabbed a sword off a dead Viking, ripped open her shirt, and banged the sword against her chest Tarzan-style, shouting and daring the enemy to approach her. The Skrellings who witnessed this fearless display got so freaked out that they immediately turned and fled. Freydis had saved the day, proving that she had the iciest nerves of all the Vikings in the process. She'd go on to kill five women with an axe in a dispute over grapes or something, an extra-curricular activity that didn’t win her a whole lot of friends when she got back to Greenland.
The Greenlanders continued to make occasional voyages to Markland to get timber, but after the Freydis mission in 1020 AD they pretty much gave up on ever dealing with Vinland again. Sure, grapes were great and all, but Vinland was about as far away as Norway, and it was populated by an unknown number of hostile people who violently resisted Viking occupation in a wide variety of violent ways. It totally wasn’t worth it to mess around with them. Europeans wouldn’t return for another four centuries.
The Vikings stopped worrying about Vinland, didn’t make many (if any) more trips there, and, over time, it was forgotten about to the point where many historians wrote the Vinland Sagas off as works of fiction.
That is, until nine hundred later, when confirmed Viking houses and artifacts were unearthed in Newfoundland, Canada and scientifically dated to 1020 AD.
(This article was adapted from a chapter in my book Guts & Glory: The Vikings, posted today in honor of Leif Erikson Day. As I mentioned, we are about to have a baby basically any day now, so I’m running a few of my book chapters as we hustle around getting things ready for the kid. Thanks for reading.)