"The country which is called Greenland was discovered and settled from Iceland. Eric the Red was the name of a man from Breidafjord who went there from here and took possession of land in the place which has since been called Ericsfjord. He named the country Greenland, and said it would make people want to go there if the country had a good name. There, both in the East and the West, they found human habitations and fragments of skin boats and stone implements, from which it was evident that the same kind of people had been there as lived in Wineland and whom the Greenlanders call Skraelingjar. He began settlement in the country 14 or 15 years before Christianity came to Iceland, according to what a man who himself had gone there with Eric the Red told Thorkell Gellisson in Greenland."
This extract from the Book of the Icelanders by Ari the Learned (1067-1148) is completely reliable, though tantalizingly brief. He could be sure that his readers knew about Wineland, and so wasted no words on the story of its discovery and the early attempts that were made to settle there.
The Book of Settlements contains more about Eric the Red, the father of Leif Ericsson. Eric’s father had fled from Norway because he had slain men, and settled in Iceland. Eric established a farm at Erisstadir in the west of Iceland and also lived for a short time on Oexney and Sudurey, two of the islands off the West coast. Like his father, he also became involved in slayings, and was eventually sentenced to three years’ outlawry and exile. Eric sailed to Greenland and spent the three years exploring both the East and West coasts. After a year in Iceland, he then moved permanently to Greenland in either 985 or 986. The same summer, 25 ships set out for Greenland, of which only 14 made the crossing. This was the beginning of the Icelandic settlement of the country, a settlement which flourished for some centuries.
The discovery of Wineland the Good and other lands on the eastern coast of North America is recorded at greater length in two mediaeval Iceland sagas, the Saga of Eric the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders. These were probably written around or soon after the year 1200, just over two centuries after the events they record. Of course it is likely that many details in them were distorted or altered in the time during which they were handed down orally, but these two sagas contain a central body of facts in common, including most of the characters, the new lands in the west, and many of the main events.
Leif was Eric’s eldest child, probably born at Ericsstadir about 970-980. As a child he moved with his parents to Greenland and grew up on the farm at Brattahlid. Following the custom common among the sons of prominent Icelandic families of the time, he made a voyage to Norway as a young man. According to the account in the Saga of Eric the Red, his ship was blown to the Hebrides and he spent most of a summer there, during which time he begot a child with a woman named Thorgunna. He arrived in Norway in the autumn. The king of Norway at the time was Olafur Tryggvason (who ruled 995-1000), and he made great efforts to convert Norway and the countries which had been settled from it to Christianity. Leif met the king, was converted, and spent the winter with him. In the spring the king sent him to Greenland to spread Christianity, and sent two men to Iceland for the same purpose, who succeeded in getting the Icelanders to adopt Christianity at the Althingi in the summer.
Leif was driven off course in this voyage, and found lands whose existence he had not previously known of. In one place there were fields of self-sown wheat and grapevines. Leif named the country Wineland. On the way back to Greenland he found men on a wrecked ship and rescued them, after which he made his way to his father’s home in Brattahlid. This took place in the year 1000 according to Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla.
Leif brought a priest with him from Norway, and set about spreading the new religion in Greenland. The saga says that Eric was reluctant to have anything to do with it, but his wife Thjodhildur was converted immediately and had a church built at some distance from the farm buildings. The settlers in Greenland were probably all converted very quickly, since no heathen graves have been found there. A cathedral and bishopric were built later in Gardar in the next fjord.
Soon after Leif’s return to Greenland, an expedition was mounted to explore the lands he had found. The explorers came first to a flat and stony land which they named Flat-Stone Land. Then they sailed further south and found another piece of land which was level and wooded, and they named this Forest Land. Then they sailed a long way south and reached a country where there were grapevines and self-won wheat. Flat-Stone Land was probably Baffin Island, while Forest Land was possibly part of Labrador. Archeological remains left by Norsemen in the Viking Age have been discovered on the northern tip of Newfoundland. They are probably the remains of wintering quarters, a staging-point on the way between Greenland and Wineland. From the descriptions in the sagas and from the objects found in Newfoundland it seems plain that Wineland was considerably further south, probably to the south of Gulf of St. Lawrence in what is now New Brunswick.
The Saga of Greenlanders tells how Bjarni Herjolfsson, the son of a settler in Greenland, was the first to see the new countries when he lost his course in fog while sailing to Greenland, and how Leif Ericsson later explored them and gave them their names. It is impossible to say now which version is correct, but if the two sagas are given equal weight then the conclusion is that both men were the discoverers, but Leif retains the credit for exploring the new lands and giving them their names according to their characteristics.
Attempts were later made to settle in Wineland. A man from Skagafjord in northern Iceland, Thorfinnur Karlsefni, led a large expedition in the early 11th century. According to the Saga of Greenlanders, there were sixty men and five women on his ship, including his wife Gudridur. Thorfinnur had all sorts of livestock with him, since he intended to settle in the new country. He got Leif’s permission to use the houses Leif had built in Wineland and stayed there with his men for three years, but was driven away following violent clashed with the Skraelingjar. During the first autumn in Leif’s house in Wineland, Snorri, the son of Thorfinnur and Gudridur was born, and he is the first European recorded in history as being born on the American continent. After a short time in Greenland, Thorfinnur and Gudridur went back to Iceland and settled at Reynines in the North.
"Gudridur was a very exceptional woman" says the Saga of Eric the Red, and the Saga of the Greenlanders says that after Thorfinnur’s death she made a pilgrimage to Rome, returned to Iceland to live with her son, finally becoming a nun and a recluse in her old age.
Very little is known about Leif’s later life. He was the most prominent person in Greenland after the death of his father, and he lived at Brattahlid. It is not known when he died, but his son Thorkell is on record as the master of Brattahlid in about 1025, so that he presumably died before then.
Leif’s determination and nobility of spirit are well attested in the two Wineland sagas, albeit in tersely-worded passages. "Leif became wealthy and well respected" says the Saga of the Greenlanders. After the rescue of the shipwrecked men, the Saga of Eric the Red reads: "In this, as in many other things, he showed the greatest nobility and goodness ... and after this he was always called Leif the Lucky".
The Orientals had him beat by at LEAST 10,000 years.