Vinland
Scandinavian warrior Leif Ericson was sent to bring Christianity to Greenland, but accidentally discovered North America instead.
?1000
King Ethelred the Unready 978-1016
Scandinavian warrior Leif Ericson was sent to bring Christianity to Greenland, but accidentally discovered North America instead.
?1000
King Ethelred the Unready 978-1016
A Viking settlement dated to around AD 1000 was uncovered in 1960 on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, with more sites in the region tentatively identified in 2012. Suddenly, a tale from the Norse sagas, routinely dismissed as myth, looked very different.
OLAF Tryggvason became a Christian while visiting the Isles of Scilly in 988,* and after he came to the throne of Norway in 995, he entrusted Leif Ericson, a royal bodyguard and a fellow-Christian, with the conversion of the Orkneys and of Greenland, Leif’s home.
However, Leif’s ship was driven far off her homeward course.* When at last he sighted land, it was not Greenland, nor anywhere he knew. But he remembered that his father Eric’s friend Bjarni Herjólfsson had reported seeing land far out west. More curious than Bjarni, Leif came ashore, and found two fellow-Scandinavians there, survivors of a shipwreck.*
On his return to Greenland, Leif mounted a full-scale expedition in Bjarni’s ship: his brief glimpse had promised salmon, maples for timber, and vines, and he was not disappointed. Leif established a permanent outpost there at the Gulf of St Lawrence, in what he called Vinland, and his merchants became the first European settlers in North America.
Olaf was an exile, and a former soldier at Novgorod in the service of Vladimir of Kiev. In 984 his wife Geira died, and Olaf went on a four-year grief-stricken rampage around the British Isles. His wrath having cooled a little, he visited the Isles of Scilly, where was converted by an unnamed hermit and baptised.
For a map of the Europe-wide spread of the Vikings from the eighth century to the eleventh, including Leif’s expedition to Vinland, see Voyages of the Vikings. The city on the Black Sea marked Miklagard is Constantinople, or Istanbul. See our post Welcome to Micklegarth.
These two shipwrecked mariners were the first recorded Europeans to set foot in North America, not Leif Ericson, nor John Cabot in 1497.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why did Leif leave Norway after Olaf Tryggvason became King in 997?
Olaf had commissioned him to evangelise Greenland.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Eric the Red fell from his horse. He thought it was a bad omen. He did not accompany his son to Vinland.