The Saga of the Greenlanders and the The Saga of Eirik the Red tell of the Viking discovery of North America. The two accounts were written independently, but the stories are ‘interlaced’ (they reference each other). Both tell of events which took place in the early 11th century and passed down by word of mouth in Greenland and Iceland until they were finally written down in 13th century Iceland.

The two stories are contradictory in a number of ways and while they provide much information about the new lands, they do not conclusively resolve the question: where was Vinland?

Both give general descriptions of the native peoples the Vikings met in those faraway lands along with relative sailing distances to and from each site and significant landscape features which ultimately helped historians determine the approximate location of Vinland: Newfoundland, part of northern Canada.

Eirik the Red lived between 950 and 1003. He is believed to have created the Norse settlement in Greenland. According to the sagas, Eirik’s father was exiled from Norway in 960AD after being involved in some kind of murders. In medieval Norway, outlawry was a legal condition in which criminals were banished from society and could be hunted down and killed if they remained on the continent. Erik’s family settled on western Iceland. Iceland was where all ‘bad’ Vikings were exiled. Here Erik the Red married a woman named Tjodhilde.

Eirik himself got involved in several killings – recounted in more detail in Eirik’s Saga. History now repeats itself and his father’s fate also befalls Eirik. In 982 he was sentenced to exile from Iceland for three years. You’ve got to be a REALLY bad Viking to get yourself exiled from exile!

The Saga of the Greenlanders describes a voyage made by Bjarni Herjolfsson, the first Norseman to see the shores of North America and the subsequent voyages of Leif Eriksson, his brother Thorvald, his evil sister Freydis, and the merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni. It describes hostilities with skraelings – the Norse term for the native peoples they met in the lands visited south and west of Greenland which they called Vinland and Markland. This saga places Erik the Red’s family at the center of the Vinland voyages.

The Saga of Erik the Red tells the Vinland story as a single expedition led by Thorfinn Karsefni, a rich trader from Iceland who married Gudrid, Leif Eriksson’s widowed sister-in-law. According to this version he traveled with her to Vinland, where they lived for several years. While in Vinland, Gudrid gave birth to Snorri, the first European known to be born in North America.

The voyages of Thorvald Eriksson and Freydis Erikssdottir – described as separate voyages in The Saga of the Greenlanders – are told here as part of the Karlsefni expedition. This account gives less prominence to the Eriksson family, though in both accounts Leif the Lucky is a heroic, magnanimous figure who converts the Greenlanders to Christianity. In this telling, Leif’s role is similar to that of Bjarni in the Greenlanders’ saga: he sites land but never sets foot on it. It focuses instead on Gudrid and Karlsefni, whose descendants include a great line of Icelandic bishops.