Sagas say he beat Columbus to continental America by centuries
Leif Erikson, or Leif the Lucky (c.970s–c.1018–1025), is thought to be the first European to walk on the American mainland—about five hundred years before Columbus. Icelandic sagas place his Vinland settlement on North America’s coast, though the exact site is still debated.
His grandfather Thorvald Ásvaldsson was banished from Norway for manslaughter and took the family to Iceland. Leif was probably born there in the 970s, perhaps near Breiðafjörður, to Erik the Red and Thjodhild. When Erik was in turn outlawed from Iceland, he sailed west, named Greenland, and in 986 brought settlers back to found its first permanent colony. Leif grew up on the family farm of Brattahlíð in the Eastern Settlement.
Two sagas written around 1200 tell his voyage differently, and scholars read both as literature rather than straight history. In the Saga of Erik the Red, Leif is converted to Christianity at the court of King Olaf Tryggvason, sent home to evangelise Greenland, and blown off course onto Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders instead credits Bjarni Herjólfsson, who sighted an unknown coast in fog but never landed. About fifteen years later Leif bought Bjarni’s ship and sailed with thirty-five men; Erik stayed behind after falling from his horse on the way to the ship, which was taken as a bad sign.
Leif wintered in Vinland and came back in spring with grapes and timber, rescuing an Icelandic castaway crew on the way home, which earned him his nickname. He never went back. His father died the following winter, shortly after 1000, leaving Leif as Greenland’s chief. He is last mentioned alive in 1018, and by 1025 his son Thorkell held the chieftaincy.
In the early 1960s Helge Ingstad and his wife Anne Stine Ingstad, an archaeologist, pinpointed Norse ruins at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland’s northern tip, carbon-dated to between 990 and 1050. Norse voyages to Markland for timber may have continued for centuries, but no lasting colony took root, and some scholars suspect his sister Freydís and foster father Tyrker are inventions.
Source: Leif Erikson
