Eight months pregnant, alone on a beach in what is now Newfoundland, a Norse woman bent down, picked up a dead man’s sword, tore open the front of her dress, and slapped the flat of the blade against her bare chest — screaming. The war party that had been chasing her fleeing countrymen stopped, stared, and ran the other way.
That is the version of Freydís Eiríksdóttir that most people who have heard of her know: the pregnant Viking who scared off an army. It is a great story. It is also only half of what the Norse sagas say about her — and the other half is a great deal darker. Depending on which medieval manuscript you trust, Freydís was either one of the bravest figures to sail from Greenland to North America, or a cold, calculating killer who ordered the murder of unarmed women with her own hands. The sagas themselves cannot agree, and thanks to Erik the Red’s daughter, neither can eleven centuries of readers since.
Who Was Freydís Eiríksdóttir?
Freydís was a daughter of Erik the Red, the exiled Norwegian-Icelander who founded the first Norse settlement in Greenland around 985 CE, which makes her a half-sister to Leif Erikson, the man usually credited as the first European to reach North America. The Saga of Erik the Red is careful to note that Freydís was not born to Erik’s wife Thjodhild but to another woman, making her, in the blunt language of the sagas, illegitimate — a detail some historians think mattered a great deal to how differently she gets treated across the two surviving accounts of her life.
She was married to a Greenlandic farmer named Thorvard, about whom the sagas say almost nothing except that he did what his wife told him to. That detail turns out to matter more than it sounds.
Freydís appears in exactly two medieval sources, known collectively as the Vinland Sagas: the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders. Both were written down in Iceland in the 13th century, roughly two hundred years after the events they describe, based on oral tradition that had been passed down for generations. They agree that Erik the Red’s children mounted a series of expeditions to a land west of Greenland they called Vinland — almost certainly the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, confirmed by archaeologists in 1960. Beyond that broad outline, the two sagas disagree about almost everything, and Freydís is where the disagreement is sharpest.
The Battle on the Beach: Freydís the Hero
In the Saga of Erik the Red, Freydís sails to Vinland as part of a large expedition led by the Icelandic merchant Thorfinn Karlsefni, alongside her half-brothers and dozens of other settlers hoping to build a permanent colony. Relations with the Indigenous people the Norse called Skrælings — almost certainly ancestors of the Beothuk or related groups — sour after a botched trade over milk and cloth escalates into violence.
When the Skrælings attack, the saga says, the Norse men panic and run for the trees, leaving the pregnant Freydís behind. She calls after them: “Why do you flee from such pitiful wretches, brave men that you are… if I had weapons, I am sure I could fight better than any of you.” Getting no response, she finds a sword lying next to a fallen Norseman, picks it up, and turns to face the attackers herself. In the saga’s most quoted line, she pulls out one of her breasts and slaps it with the flat of the blade. The Skrælings, apparently startled or repulsed, break off the attack and flee back to their boats.
It is a scene tailor-made for retelling — a single armed, heavily pregnant woman holding a battlefield alone — and it has made Freydís a recurring reference point in the broader question of whether Norse women fought, a debate covered in depth in our piece on shield-maidens. Unlike most shield-maiden stories, which survive only in legendary sagas set generations before living memory, Freydís’s stand appears in a saga that is at least trying to describe real, nameable people and a real, archaeologically confirmed place.
The Massacre at the Camp: Freydís the Villain
The Saga of the Greenlanders tells an entirely different, much uglier story, and never mentions the beach battle at all.
In this version, Freydís strikes a business deal with two Icelandic brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, to jointly outfit an expedition to Vinland, each side contributing thirty men. Freydís secretly smuggles five extra men aboard her ship, breaking the agreement before the voyage even begins. Once in Vinland, the two crews fall out over where to store their ships and shelter for the winter, and the tension curdles into open hostility.
One morning, Freydís walks barefoot through the frost to Finnbogi’s camp and proposes trading ships, since his is larger. He agrees. She returns home and climbs into bed beside Thorvard with icy, wet feet. When he asks what happened, she lies: Finnbogi and his men assaulted her, she says, and beat her when she asked to trade ships. She threatens to divorce Thorvard unless he avenges her. He gathers his men, marches to Helgi and Finnbogi’s camp, and kills every man there while they sleep.
Five women survive the massacre. Thorvard’s men refuse to kill them. Freydís, the saga says flatly, picks up an axe herself and kills all five, “not stopping until they were all dead.”
She swears her own men to secrecy and threatens to kill anyone who talks, promising them riches from the stolen ship’s cargo instead. Word still gets back to Greenland. When Leif Erikson hears the rumours, he has three of Freydís’s men tortured until they confess the full story. He does not punish his half-sister — the saga suggests he lacks the will to move against family — but he tells her that her descendants will never prosper. According to the saga, no one respected her or her line again.
Why Do the Sagas Disagree?
Historians generally agree the two accounts cannot both be literally true, and most treat neither as a reliable transcript of real events — both were compiled centuries later by Christian Icelandic writers shaping oral legend into narrative. But the contradiction is not random. The Saga of Erik the Red was likely written with an eye to flattering the descendants of Thorfinn Karlsefni and his wife Gudrid, who by the 13th century counted bishops among their line; a version of Vinland history centred on their courage, with Freydís as a supporting player capable of a single heroic act, served that family’s reputation well. The Saga of the Greenlanders, generally considered the older and less polished of the two texts, has no such agenda protecting Freydís, and gives her the entire, damning spotlight instead.
Put together, the two sagas may be less a factual record and more a 13th-century argument about how one particular Viking Age family should be remembered — with Freydís caught in the middle of it, a millennium after she supposedly lived.
Freydís’s Legacy Today
Whichever version is closer to the truth, Freydís Eiríksdóttir has outlasted both her half-brother’s fame and her own scandal. She turns up in historical fiction, in documentaries about the Norse discovery of North America, and in the wider pop-culture wave of interest in Viking women that shows like Vikings and The Last Kingdom helped fuel. She sits at an odd crossroads in Norse history: unlike Odin, Freya, or the Valkyries of Norse mythology, she is not a legendary figure but a named person the sagas place at a real, excavated Viking site — which is exactly what makes the gap between “hero” and “murderer” so uncomfortable. Myths can hold two contradictory truths at once. History is supposed to pick one.
For now, it hasn’t. Freydís remains the only woman in the entire Vinland saga tradition given a story dramatic enough to be told twice, in two completely different ways — proof, if nothing else, that she left as strong an impression on the people who remembered her as she apparently left on the Skrælings she faced down on that Newfoundland beach.
