ERIK THE RED

A mass murderer persuades four hundred people to follow him to Greenland
c. AD 980–1000

Men will be more readily persuaded to go there if the land has an attractive name.

—Erik the Red

ERIK THE RED WAS A GIGANTIC VIKING with a humongous red beard, a steady axe-swinging hand, and a ferocious, white-hot temper that made him completely fly off the handle and mass-murder his neighbors on more than one occasion. He was banished from two different Viking countries for being too over-the-top with his homicidal behavior, and in his exile from civilized society he ended up braving the uncharted wilderness of a previously unexplored land. Then he came back home, somehow persuaded something like four hundred people to follow him into the settlement of an unknown island that was blanketed by glaciers on 90 percent of its surface, became the ruler of his own private supervillain-style island fortress, and laid the foundation for the Norse people to discover the American continent roughly five hundred years before Christopher Columbus.

Erik’s name comes from his red hair and fiery beard rather than his penchant for freaking out berserker-style and planting a hatchet in his next-door neighbors every time they forgot to return the lawn mower they’d borrowed. He first shows up in history around 980. According to the sagas, Erik and his dad had been forced to sail the seven hundred miles from Norway to Iceland after being convicted of “some killings,” probably in one of the family blood feuds the Vikings were so famous for, and both men were forbidden ever to return. Erik, already in his thirties by this point, settled down in Iceland, bought a farm, raised sheep, married a woman named Thjoldhild (Erik’s mother-in-law was even more awesomely known as “Thorbjorg the Ship-Chested”), probably went on a few Viking raids in the summertime, and did well enough for himself that he was able to afford a bunch of nice stuff like livestock, gold, jewelry, and slaves.

Things were going pretty great until one day some of Erik’s slaves were messing around and accidentally caused a huge landslide that crushed a big part of Erik’s neighbor’s house with an avalanche of boulders and dirt. The neighbor, a little ticked off about this turn of events, clawed his way out of the rubble, got together a couple of his closest friends, and killed all the slaves with an axe.

Bad move.

Erik returned his neighbor’s kindness by knocking on the dude’s half-crushed door and then burying a sword in him when he opened it. That guy’s cousin, a battle-hardened warrior known as Hrafn the Dueler, challenged Erik to a duel, so Erik the Red killed that guy, too.

The dead neighbor’s kinsmen, wising up to the fact that Erik the Red was ridiculously ginormous and knew how to handle himself in an ultra-vengeance showdown, went the more civilized route and brought charges against Erik at the local Thing—the Viking meeting of townspeople to discuss laws and settle disputes. Erik was sentenced to lesser outlawry, meaning he had three years to get the heck out of Iceland, and that he wouldn’t be allowed to return for three more years.

Now barred from Iceland and Norway, Erik the Red started gathering his stuff together and tried to figure out what the heck he was going to do. In the meantime, a neighbor of his named Thorgest asked to borrow some bench boards because he was having friends over for dinner. Erik, being the good neighbor that he was, was like, “Yeah, buddy, no problem, of course.” Thorgest borrowed the benches but then forgot to return them. After a few months had passed, Erik went to see what was going on with those missing boards, and while he and Thorgest were having a civilized discussion, all of a sudden weapons were drawn and Erik found himself in a huge brawl in which he killed Thorgest’s two adult sons and “certain other men” in hand-to-hand combat with a two-handed Viking long axe.

Erik found himself in Thing Court once more, and this time he was upgraded from lesser outlaw to full outlaw. This meant that he would lose all his land and property and be forced to leave the country immediately. It was also illegal for any Icelander to help him in any way, and any person from Iceland could just run up and kill him on sight without any legal penalty for doing so. The two families who had suffered because of Erik were pretty happy about this and immediately formed vigilante posses to hunt the dude down.

Erik the Red, for his part, was done with all this garbage. He was out of here. Civilized life was for chumps, anyway.

Erik got together his family, a couple of friends, a few slaves, and some livestock; loaded them onto a rickety old ship; and sailed as far away from civilization as he could get. Instead of heading east toward England, Denmark, or Europe, he went west in search of an uncharted landmass that had only been discovered about seventy years earlier—a huge, glacier-covered island we now know as Greenland.

Greenland had been accidentally discovered by the Viking Gunnbjörn Ulf-Krakuson, who found a “bleak land of ice” when he was looking for Iceland. Uninterested, and apparently realizing that this was a different bleak land of ice than the one he was looking for, Ulf-Krakuson turned around immediately and went back home. About twenty years after that, a guy named Snaebjörn Galti and a group of colonists tried to settle on one of the frozen islands off the coast of Greenland (known by then as “Gunnbjörn’s Skerries”), but that didn’t work out so hot. Living in Gunnbjörn’s Skerries was so awful that all the colonists killed one another a few months after they moved there. The settlement was never heard from again, and nobody had even tried to sail near there in something like fifty years.

So you can see the appeal for Erik the Red.

Sailing for five days, Erik was hammered by storms, evaded Titanic-sinking glaciers in the North Atlantic, and rode out high winds and waves in a rickety old wooden boat. (Icelandic lumber was no good for shipbuilding, so all the boats in Iceland were used-car-style ships that had been built in Norway many years earlier.) The exiled Viking and his family made the perilous journey through uncharted waters to a landmass no European had ever set foot on. Erik found nothing of value on the east side of the island, but after he ventured around the cape on the southern tip, he found a few decent spots on the west side that would be perfect pasture for livestock. Erik settled down, unloaded his stuff, and prepared to live off the land with only his wits and strength to keep himself and his family alive.

Erik climbed mountains, sailed up and down inlets, discovered fjords and forests and green pastures, identified a few good places for settlements, and named almost every geographic feature on the world’s largest island after himself. He survived three years in the hostile, freezing climate of Greenland, fishing for salmon and cod in the fjords, raising goats and cows in the fields, and constantly laughing his butt off because the native animals of the island had never seen people before, so you could literally walk right up to them and bop them on the head with an axe and then turn their bodies into everything from stylish fur coats to a delicious Sunday brunch.

While he was gone, Erik somehow managed to get his full-outlaw status downgraded to lesser outlaw (how he did this isn’t clear, but it definitely involved another round of sword-on-sword combat with his old neighbor Thorgest). When he triumphantly returned to Iceland in 985, he had some amazing stories to tell people of how the glorious new land he had discovered was so completely radical that everyone should move there. Even though he knew the place was almost entirely covered by glaciers and solid ice pack, Erik told everyone he had named it Greenland because of its sprawling pastures and green fields. He was lying.

Inspired by his tales of adventure and his stories of a lush fantasy land where pretty girls and money and beer literally grew on trees, hundreds of Icelanders were persuaded to follow Erik back to Greenland and start a Viking colony there. Twenty-five ships loaded with men, women, children, and livestock set sail in 985.

By the time they reached Greenland, only fourteen of those ships remained—the rest had been sunk in storms, had crashed into ice floes, or had turned back because of rough seas and the sheer terror of the insane journey they were making. The colonists were a little disappointed with the scenery but stayed and settled in two villages. The main one, established at a place known as Eriksfjord (after Erik, of course), was home to nearly four hundred villagers.