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Almost five hundred years before Christopher Columbus ever saw the Bahamas, a small crew of Norse sailors pulled their ship onto a grassy shoreline in what is now Newfoundland, Canada, and built a settlement of turf-walled halls. They did not know they had reached a new continent. They just knew there was timber, wild grapes, and salmon “bigger than any they had seen before” — and that made the risk of the crossing worth it.
The man usually credited with getting them there is Leif Erikson. The man who made the whole Norse presence in the North Atlantic possible in the first place was his father, Erik the Red. Between them, this father-and-son pair pushed the edge of the known world from Norway to Iceland, from Iceland to Greenland, and finally from Greenland to North America — two of the most consequential explorers in European history, and two of the least understood outside of Scandinavia.
If you have read A Brief History of the Vikings, you have already met both men in passing. Here is the fuller story.
Erik the Red: Banished His Way to Greenland
Erik Thorvaldsson — nicknamed “the Red,” most likely for his hair and famous temper rather than any bloodshed — was born in Norway around 950 CE, but he did not stay there long. His father was exiled for manslaughter and the family relocated to Iceland, which by then was already a Norse colony filling up with restless settlers and long-running feuds.
Erik inherited the temper along with the surname. According to the Icelandic sagas, a dispute over some borrowed bench-boards escalated into a killing, and Erik was sentenced to three years of outlawry — banished from Iceland entirely. Rather than sit out his exile quietly, he decided to sail west and see what was out there. Icelandic sailors had already spotted land further out in the North Atlantic, but no one had properly explored it.
Erik spent his exile mapping the coastline of an enormous, largely uninhabitable island of ice and rock. When his banishment ended around 985 CE, he sailed back to Iceland with a plan that was equal parts real-estate ambition and marketing genius: he called the place Greenland, a name generous enough to talk hundreds of land-hungry Icelanders into loading up their ships and following him back. Twenty-five ships reportedly set out; only fourteen survived the crossing. Those that made it founded the Eastern and Western Settlements, Norse Greenland’s first colonies, with Erik as their obvious leader — a status confirmed by the fact that his own farm was named Brattahlíð, “the steep slope,” and became the settlement’s political and religious hub for centuries.
Leif Erikson: Finding Vinland
Leif was raised in that Greenland colony his father built, and he had exploration in his blood. Around the year 1000 CE, according to the two main sagas that tell his story — the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders — Leif either deliberately set out to find new land to the west, or bought a ship from a merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson who had already glimpsed unfamiliar coastline after being blown off course years earlier. Either way, Leif was the one who actually went ashore.
He and his crew worked their way down a coastline they divided into three named stops: Helluland (“Stone-Slab Land,” likely Baffin Island), Markland (“Forest Land,” likely Labrador), and finally Vinland — “Wine Land” — named, the sagas say, for the wild grapes one of Leif’s men found growing there. Vinland had mild winters, salmon, and timber, all of which were in desperately short supply back in treeless, ice-bound Greenland. Leif and his crew wintered there before sailing home with a cargo the settlement badly needed.
For centuries, Vinland stayed firmly in the category of saga legend — a good story, unconfirmed by anything except medieval manuscripts written generations after the fact. That changed in 1960.
L’Anse aux Meadows: The Proof
In 1960, Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, working from local Newfoundland fishermen’s accounts of old “Indian” ruins that didn’t match any known Indigenous building style, excavated a site at the northern tip of Newfoundland called L’Anse aux Meadows. What they found were the unmistakable remains of a Norse settlement: turf-walled longhouses in the Icelandic and Greenlandic style, a smithy with iron slag, a carpentry workshop, and a bronze cloak pin identical to styles worn across the Norse world around 1000 CE.
L’Anse aux Meadows is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it remains the only confirmed Norse site in North America outside Greenland. It does not prove that this exact spot was Leif’s Vinland — most historians think it was a base camp used for exploring a wider Vinland region further south — but it settled the argument that mattered: the Norse reached the North American mainland, and they did it roughly five centuries before Columbus’s 1492 voyage.
Freydís, Thorvald, and a Family Business of Exploration
Leif was not the only member of the family to try his luck in Vinland. His brothers Thorvald and Thorstein both led follow-up expeditions — Thorvald was killed in North America after a clash with Indigenous people the sagas call Skrælings, becoming, by that account, the first European to die on the continent. Their half-sister, Freydís Eiríksdóttir, led her own Vinland voyage and is remembered in the sagas for standing her ground during an ambush, baring a sword against her own pregnant belly to frighten off attackers when the men around her fled. We covered her family’s fiercest women in more depth in our piece on whether Viking women really fought in battle.
Despite several attempts, the Norse never established a permanent Vinland colony. The distance from Greenland was enormous, the Greenland settlement itself was small and short on manpower, and relations with the Indigenous peoples the sagas describe were hostile more often than not. Within a decade or two, the family’s ambitions in North America quietly stopped, and Vinland faded back into saga and memory — while Erik’s Greenland colony, the base camp for it all, lasted for roughly 450 years before its own mysterious disappearance in the 15th century.
Why Columbus Got the Statue
If the Norse reached America first, why does Columbus Day still dwarf Leif Erikson Day in most of the world’s memory? Mostly, it comes down to consequences rather than chronology. Columbus’s 1492 voyage triggered sustained, large-scale European contact, colonization, and — eventually — global historical change. Leif’s landing left a smithy’s worth of iron slag and a few generations of stories; it had no lasting effect on world history because the Norse colony in Vinland never took root.
The United States has recognized Leif Erikson Day on October 9th since 1964, largely thanks to lobbying from Scandinavian-American communities, and Iceland, Norway, and the Faroe Islands mark the same date. It is a smaller holiday than Columbus’s, but it rests on firmer archaeological ground than most people realize — L’Anse aux Meadows is not a legend, it is a UNESCO site you can visit today.
Visiting the Real Places
You cannot walk through Leif’s original Vinland settlement outside of the reconstructed longhouses at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, but you can stand on ground the family actually shaped. Erik the Red’s farmstead of Brattahlíð survives as the modern Greenlandic settlement of Qassiarsuk, a short boat trip from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, with a reconstructed Norse church and turf longhouse open to visitors each summer. If you are curious how Erik’s Greenland compares to its snowier neighbor, our explainer on Iceland vs. Greenland is a good place to start, and for more on the era’s naming customs, see our guide to Old Norse names — Erik and Leif’s own names among them.
The Bottom Line
Erik the Red turned a personal disaster — exile for manslaughter — into the founding of an entire Norse colony, using nothing but nerve and a well-chosen name. His son Leif went one step further and quietly became the first confirmed European to set foot in North America, five hundred years before it was supposedly “discovered.” Neither of them set out to make history in the way we now remember it: they were looking for farmland, timber, and a way to feed a colony clinging to survival at the edge of the known world. That the results ended up written into two continents’ worth of legend and archaeology is, in true Viking fashion, mostly a side effect of just trying to get by.
