Erik the Red: The Exile Who Founded Greenland

Erik the Red (Eiríkr Þorvaldsson, born around 950) was a Norse chieftain who founded the first European settlement in Greenland around 985 AD. Exiled from Iceland over killings, he spent his three-year sentence surveying Greenland's coast, then named the island deliberately to attract settlers. The sagas preserve his sales pitch in his own words.

Almost everything we know about him comes from four medieval Icelandic texts: Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, both written down in the 13th century, some two hundred years after the events, plus the earlier Landnámabók and Íslendingabók, compiled in the early 1100s. The broad outline is supported by archaeology at his farm site in Greenland. The dialogue and the drama are saga craft, and wherever that line matters, we'll say so.

Who Was Erik the Red?

He was born into trouble. Landnámabók says his father, Þorvaldr Ásvaldsson of Jæren in Norway, left the country "because of some killings." No details survive. Father and son sailed to Iceland, found the good land long since claimed, and settled at Drangar on Hornstrandir in the far northwest, a bleak stretch nobody else wanted. Erik was still a boy.

The byname "the Red" is usually taken to describe his hair and beard, though the sagas never actually explain it. After his father died, Erik married Þjóðhildr, moved south to the Haukadalr valley, and cleared a farm at Eiríksstaðir. Better land, better prospects. It didn't last.

Why Was Erik the Red Exiled from Iceland?

Twice, and both times men died first. The first feud began when Erik's slaves set off a landslide that buried a neighbor's farm. A kinsman of the neighbor, a man the saga calls Eyjólfr the Foul, killed the slaves in return. Erik killed Eyjólfr, and a fighter known as Hrafn the Dueller besides, and the district drove him out of Haukadalr.

The second feud is stranger, because it started over furniture. Erik lent his setstokkr, the carved beams that framed a hall's high seat, to a farmer named Þorgestr while he moved house, and could not get them back. So he went and took them. Þorgestr rode after him with a war party, and in the fight that followed two of Þorgestr's sons were killed, "and certain other men" as Eiríks saga puts it. At the Þórsnes assembly, conventionally dated 982, Erik was sentenced to lesser outlawry: three years banished from Iceland, and fair game for his enemies if he stayed.

What Did He Do with Three Years of Outlawry?

He sailed toward a rumor. Decades earlier a sailor named Gunnbjörn, blown off course, had sighted skerries and a coastline far west of Iceland. Erik told his friends he meant to find that land, fitted out a ship, and headed west. He made the east coast of Greenland, rounded the southern point the sagas call Hvarf, and spent the full three years working through the fjords of the southwest.

This wasn't drifting. It was scouting. He wintered at places he named after himself, Eiríksey and Eiríksfjörðr among them, tested the pasture, and marked where a farm could stand. When the sentence ran out, he sailed back to Iceland with a settlement plan in his head and a name ready for the land he wanted to fill.

Why Did He Call It Greenland?

Because a good name sells. Íslendingabók, written by Ari the Learned around 1122 to 1133, records the reasoning bluntly: he called it Greenland because "people would be much more eager to go there if the land had a good name." Eiríks saga repeats the line. This is not a joke someone invented about him a thousand years later. It is his own logic, written down by his countrymen within a few generations of his death.

Now the part that complicates the joke: the name may not have been a lie. Erik's lifetime sat inside what climate scientists call the Medieval Warm Period, and ice-core records from the Greenland ice sheet point to a comparatively mild North Atlantic in exactly those centuries. The inner fjords of the southwest are genuinely green in summer even today; sheep farms operate around Qassiarsuk right now, on the very ground Erik picked. He wasn't describing the ice cap. He was naming the island after its best hundred miles, which is what any salesman does.

Twenty-Five Ships Sailed. Fourteen Arrived.

The pitch worked. In 985, by the usual dating, twenty-five ships left Iceland for Greenland, loaded with families, livestock, and timber. Landnámabók says only fourteen arrived; the rest turned back or were lost at sea. Even at that price the colony held. The survivors founded the Eastern Settlement, around today's Qaqortoq and Narsaq, and the smaller Western Settlement hundreds of miles up the coast near modern Nuuk.

Erik claimed the finest land for himself: Brattahlíð, "the steep slope," at the head of Eiríksfjörðr, where the village of Qassiarsuk stands today. As first settler and namer of the country, he became its leading chieftain. Norse Greenland was never large, a few thousand people at its height on most estimates, but it endured for more than four centuries and kept contact with Europe nearly the whole time. The last written record of the colony is a wedding held at Hvalsey church in 1408.

The Price at Home: Þjóðhildr's Church

Around the year 1000, Christianity reached Greenland. Eiríks saga credits Erik's son Leif with bringing it from Norway at King Olaf Tryggvason's urging; historians treat those details as saga embroidery, but the conversion itself is real. Þjóðhildr embraced the new faith. Erik did not. The saga says she built a church "not too near the farmhouse" and refused to live with her husband while he kept to the old gods, which, the text adds, annoyed him greatly.

Here the ground backs the story. In 1961, construction work at Qassiarsuk uncovered a tiny turf chapel, only a few meters on a side, with more than a hundred burials around it, set apart from the farm buildings exactly where the saga puts Þjóðhildr's church. Nobody can prove whose church it was. But it is small, early, and standing at a careful distance from the hall, and that is precisely the arrangement the saga describes.

How Did Erik the Red Die?

He missed America because of a horse. When his son organized a voyage to the lands sighted west of Greenland, he asked Erik to lead it. Grœnlendinga saga says Erik rode down toward the ship, was thrown when his horse stumbled, and hurt his foot. He read it as an omen that he was not fated to find more lands than the one he lived in, turned back to Brattahlíð, and let his son sail without him. That son was Leif Erikson, who reached Vinland around 1000 AD; the full story of the Norse voyages to America belongs to the next generation.

Erik's own end follows quickly in the sagas. Grœnlendinga saga places his death in the winter after Leif's return, which by the usual dating means around 1003. The same winter, the saga says, sickness swept through the shipwrecked crew Leif had rescued and killed many of them; Erik is often assumed to have died in that outbreak, though the text never states his cause of death. He left four children the sagas name, Leif, Þorvaldr, Þorsteinn, and a daughter, Freydís, and every one of them sailed for Vinland in turn. Not a bad ledger for a man thrown out of two countries: his colony outlived him by four hundred years, and the name he coined as a sales pitch is still on every map in the world.

Erik the Red FAQ

Why was Erik the Red exiled?

His father was exiled from Norway over killings, and Erik repeated the pattern in Iceland. He was banished from his district after killing two men in a landslide feud, then outlawed from Iceland entirely, around 982, when a quarrel over lent high-seat beams ended with several dead, including two sons of the farmer Þorgestr.

Why is Greenland called Greenland?

Erik named it to attract settlers, and admitted as much. Íslendingabók records his reasoning: people would be far more eager to go if the land had a good name. It was marketing, but not quite a lie. During the Medieval Warm Period the southwest fjords held real summer pasture, and they are still green today.

Was Erik the Red a real person?

Yes, by scholarly consensus. He appears in Íslendingabók and Landnámabók, written within about 150 years of his life, and two sagas tell his story in full. Archaeology supports the outline: Norse farm ruins and an early turf church stand at Qassiarsuk, his Brattahlíð. The speeches and dramatic details, though, are saga literature.

Who was Erik the Red's son?

His most famous son was Leif Erikson, the first European known to have reached North America, around 1000 AD. The sagas name two more sons, Þorvaldr and Þorsteinn, and a daughter, Freydís. All four of Erik's children took part in voyages toward Vinland after their father stayed behind.

How did Erik the Red die?

The sagas say he fell from his horse while riding to join the Vinland voyage, took the fall as a bad omen, and stayed home. Grœnlendinga saga places his death in the winter after Leif returned, around 1003 by the usual dating. Neither saga records a cause of death.

Keep exploring: see where the year 985 falls on our Viking Age timeline, trace his route west on the interactive Viking world map, or browse Norse jewelry inspired by the saga age.