Who were the first Norse and Celtic visitors to North America, and what brought them here?
It sounds strange, perhaps, to say that a couple of bed boards changed the course of world history, but the man who owned the boards was no ordinary tenth-century gentleman. He was a notorious hothead who couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. In fact, the bed boards were just the last straw in a long line of offenses that had managed to get him banished from one region and two countries, and set him on the road to paradise. And we mean that literally.
Who was the troublemaker? He was an immigrant who had recently come to Iceland because he’d been banished from Norway for murder. He was clearly a man of questionable character, and the leaders of Iceland quickly concluded they wanted him gone. So in A.D. 982, the Icelandic Thing, the democratic parliament at the Thorsnes Assembly, met to decide the case involving the loan of a cow and some bedstead boards. The man at the center of the controversy was Eirikr Thorvaldsson, nicknamed Eirikr Raudi for his flaming red hair. He is better known to us as Eric the Red.
Let’s talk about the man himself before we discuss the history of Norse voyages to North America. A man’s character, after all, sets the stage for his actions, and in this case the man’s actions would be the catalyst for legendary voyages in search of the mythical paradise that the Norse called Hvitramannaland, which literally meant “the Land of the White Men.”
Eirikr arrived in Breidafjord, Iceland, around the year A.D. 979, where he married Thjodhild, the daughter of Jorund Atlason and Thorbjorg Ship-breast (the Norse had very descriptive names). He established a small farm in Haukadal by Vatnshorn, and probably tried to live within the bounds of society. However, it didn’t take long for trouble to erupt. As Eiriks saga rauda, The Saga of Eirikr the Red, tells it:
Eirikr’s slaves then caused a landslide to fall on the farm of Valthjof at Valthjofsstadir. His kinsman Filth-Eyjof killed the slaves near Skeidsbrekkur above Vatnshorn. For this, Eirikr slew Filth-Eyjof. He also killed Hrafn the Dueller at Leikskalar. Geirstein and Odd of Jorvi, Eyjolf’s kinsmen, sought redress for his killing.
The saga doesn’t tell us if Eirikr killed both men by himself, but since he alone is noted as going after the boards, he may have. So if we start counting, Eirikr had killed at least one man in Norway—though we don’t know the actual count that got him banished from country—and by 979, he’d killed two more men. That’s three murders so far. The saga continues:
After this Eirikr was outlawed from Haukadal. He claimed the islands Brokey and Oxney and farmed at Tradir on Sudurey island the first winter. It was then Eirikr lent Thorgest bedstead boards. Later he moved to Oxney, where he farmed at Erikrsstadir. He then asked for the bedstead boards back without success. Eirikr went to Breidabolstad and took the boards, and Thorgest came after him. They fought not far from the farm at Drangar, where two of Thorgest’s sons were killed, along with several other men.
After that both of them kept a large following.
We can add Thorgest’s two sons to the murder count, for a total of five, but how many is “several other men”? Let’s guess it may have been three or four more, so maybe nine men dead at Eirikr’s hands or the hands of those helping him. And we know Eirikr was not alone in the Thorgest fight. He brought companions to help him get the boards. The saga writer tells us:
Eirikr and his companions were sentenced to outlawry at the Thorsnes Assembly.1
Eirikr was lucky. He was only found guilty of “lesser outlawry,” similar to our charge of manslaughter. The Thorsnes Assembly clearly believed he had some justification for the killings. Eirikr and his companions were only banished from Iceland for three years. Full outlawry would have condemned him to skoggangur, “forest-walking,” meaning he would have been banished for life from civilized society, literally condemned to “walk the forest.” The crime of lesser outlawry kept his lands and property intact. They were not confiscated, so he could return in the future and take up his life again. As well, he had three years to leave Iceland. So:
He made his ship ready in Eirikrsvog, and Eyjolf hid him in Dimunarvog while Thorgest and his men searched the islands for him.
We presume that his friend, Eyjolf, had to hide Eirikr because he had traveled outside the “enclosure.” The enclosure was a designated space, “composed by three sacrosanct homes, no more than one day’s journey from each other, where the outlaw was permitted to stay while he arranged passage out of Iceland. He was allowed limited movement along the tracks directly joining these farms, and en route to the ship which would take him abroad. If found anywhere else, the outlaw could be killed without redress.” 2
Obviously, Thorgest and his men hoped to find Eirikr outside the enclosure to take vengeance for the murders of their family and friends.
While Eirikr hid out, he made his decision:
Eirikr said he intended to seek out the land that Gunnbjorn, the son of Ulf Crow, had seen when he was driven off course westward and discovered Gunnbjorn’s skerry (Gunnbjarnarsker). …Eirikr sailed seaward from Snaefellsnes and approached land under the glacier called Hvitserk. From there, he sailed southwards, seeking suitable land for settlement.
It was a bold move. Eirikr Raudi set sail across the northern Atlantic at what was arguably the most dangerous period in history, the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from around A.D. 900–1300. As sea ice disintegrated and the glaciers collapsed, they spawned massive ice islands—chunks of ice weighing billions of tons that drifted out to sea, where they melted and broke into smaller, but still gigantic, islands. In addition, as ocean temperatures climbed, arctic fog seems to have become particularly brutal. On his first voyage to Greenland with colonists, in A.D. 985 or 986, Eirikr left Iceland with twenty-five ships and around five hundred settlers. Only fourteen ships survived the journey.
What was it like to sail at this time? In the Saga of the Greenlanders, Bjarni describes the experience: Bjarni “set sail once they had made ready and sailed for three days, until the land had disappeared below the horizon. Then the wind dropped and they were beset by winds from the north and fog; for many days they did not know where they were sailing.” Later, after Eirikr’s son Leifr bought Bjarni’s ship, he and his crew often found themselves lost while sailing to Vinland the Good: “…throughout the summer they were at the mercy of the weather and never knew where they were going.”
Over the course of years, so many ships became lost at sea trying to cross the Atlantic that official expeditions were established to comb the shorelines in search of bodies. As The Tale of Tosti chronicles, it was the job of those who were “lig-lodin,” corpse-lodin, to search the “northern wild regions during the summers, bringing back south for church burial dead bodies of shipwrecked and ice-wrecked mariners whom he found in caves and craters. By their side were always carved runes that would tell of all their misfortunes and torment.” 3
Given these circumstances, why would Eirikr choose to head west across a perilous, iceberg-ridden sea, rather than returning to the civilized world of Europe? Even if Norway and Iceland had banished Eirikr, he could have settled elsewhere and probably built a good life for himself and his family. Was he a madman? Or just desperate to escape the bonds of civilization and find a place where no laws existed?
While both may be true to some degree, this story is actually a lot more interesting.
You see, for most of his life Eirikr Raudi had been immersed in the widespread and mesmerizing tales of an earthly paradise that lay far to the west. The Norse called it Hvitramannaland. The Celtic term was Tir na bhFear bhFionn, and the British referred to it as Albania-land. All meant “the Land of the White Men.”
Like others before him, Eirikr Raudi may have believed he could find it.