Born Into Blood
Most Americans are taught that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover North America. However, the story of Leif Erikson proves that’s a lie. This hard-living Viking came from a long line of explorers before setting foot in what he called “Vinland”—and he left a trail of mysteries and tragedies in his wake.
1. His Bloodline Was Violent
Like any good Viking saga, Leif Erikson’s story starts many years before he was born, with a stain on his family that would seep through generations. His father Erik the Red, one of the biggest Viking explorers of his generation, grew up under the shadow of his father Thorvald’s sins: When Erik was still young and growing up in Norway, Thorvald was banished from the country for committing manslaughter.
It began an itinerant existence that would shape Leif Erikson’s life, but it also began a pattern of bloodshed.
2. He Was Probably Icelandic
The family eventually settled in Iceland, and somewhere around 970 Erik married Thjodhild Jorundsdottir, and had three children with her, Leif himself and his two brothers, Thorvald and Thorstein. For a time, Leif grew up in relative peace in Iceland. But then his father destroyed everything in a single moment.
3. His Father Was A Loose Cannon
Erik the Red was so named for his red hair, but he had a fiery temper to match. One day, he went off like a grenade. After a neighboring farmer killed Erik’s serfs for a supposed infraction, Erik got revenge by slaying the farmer right back, plus another man for good measure.
This altercation led to Erik being banished from the village his young family was living in, but his next blow-up had more disturbing consequences.
4. He Had An Itinerant Childhood
Leif was only about 12 years old when his family left their village and settled in a new one in the west of Iceland. While there, his father tried to strike up much-needed friendships, including with another neighbor. While he built the family’s new house, Erik asked the neighbor to keep his setstokkr—mystical, religious-like pillars—for him.
The neighbor obliged, but Leif’s father would soon regret trusting the man.
5. His Father Killed Again
With the family home built, Leif’s father went back to the neighbor to get his pillars, only to find the neighbor unwilling to give them back. It caused a catastrophe. A back-and-forth exchange quickly led to an all-out chase, which ended with Erik slaying two of the neighbor’s sons along with “some other men”. Suddenly, a stand off began.
6. He Grew Up In A Rival Gang
Over the next period of time, Leif watched as his father gathered allies against his neighbor, and then looked on as the neighbor did the same. Before long, both men were practically surrounded by heavies at all times, each one just waiting for the other to snap and see what happened. Until, that is, justice caught up.
7. He Was An Exile
When the Icelandic legislature heard about Erik’s enraged spree on his neighbor’s sons, they handed down a bitter punishment. Just like his father, Erik the Red was now banished from his country, and had to leave Iceland along with his allies as an outlaw.
All this, and during the most formative years of Leif Erikson’s life. But another milestone was coming.
8. His Father Left Him
With Norway and Iceland now unavailable to him, Erik had very little options when it came to resettling his family for the second time. Straight-off, he took an expedition to explore the largely uninhabited land of Greenland, leaving Leif and the rest of his brood so he could make a proper survey of the place and suss out its settlement possibilities.
When Leif’s father finally came back, he had big news for his son.
9. He Went To A Remote Land
Erik the Red was now obsessed with settling the so-called “Greenland”—which he had named to emphasize its apparently Edenic qualities next to “Iceland”—and took his wife and children over there along with a handful of other colonists to make a go of it.
It was in these barren lands that Leif Erikson got perhaps his first lucky break.
10. He Barely Survived
Leif’s father was a larger-than-life figure, and he had sold larger-than-life expectations for the colonial journey to Greenland. It ended with tragedy. Although 25 ships had set sail for the land, only 14 of them arrived on its shores. 11 of those boats had simply turned back, but the rest were likely lost at sea.
The constant drama was already leaving a mark on Leif.
11. He Was Homeless At Heart
Leif was still around his pre-teen years at this time, but had lived in near constant and violent turmoil likely since he could remember. He had no fixed home, and his new abode was an intimidating work-in-progress, with long hours spent building villages until his family’s settlement grew to 5,000 people.
It’s no wonder, then, that Leif grew up with wandering feet—but he wasn’t exactly like this father.
12. He Rejected His Father
Leif had reportedly inherited some of his father’s striking looks and physicality as well as Erik the Red’s incessant need to push onward, but the similarities stopped there. Leif apparently had very little of his father’s brashness, and he is described in the sagas as a “wise” and “considerate” man. Then again, perhaps after seeing what his father’s brashness had done, Leif consciously chose not to indulge in it.
Even so, as we’ll see, his considerate nature would cost him.
13. He Tried To Go Back “Home”
When Leif was a “proper age,” he had a long-delayed homecoming. He traveled to his ancestral home of Norway at last, most probably to work as King Olaf Tryggvason’s retainer at the royal court. But before he could make it there, at least according to the Saga of Erik the Red, he hit a snag that would trigger an odyssey.
14. He Was Almost Shipwrecked
While heading to Norway, Leif was at the mercy of the winds—and the winds didn’t feel particularly merciful toward him. His ship got pushed into the Hebrides, off the west coast of what is now the Scottish mainland, and the traveler and his crew had to hunker down for the summer while they waited for a better wind pattern.
As it happened, it was a date with destiny.
15. He Fell In Love
While in the Hebrides, Leif experienced a whirlwind romance. Still young and rash, he fell in love with the noblewoman Thorgunna, and their passionate tryst produced a son, Thorglis. In another version of Leif’s story, he may have stopped traveling entirely after this and settled down with his love. But that simply wasn’t Leif Erikson.
16. He Abandoned His Lover
When the winds picked up in a better direction, Leif barely gave it a second thought before choosing to leave the Hebrides and continue on to Norway as he’d always planned. But he gave up something crucial. Thorgunna’s parents apparently wouldn’t let her go with Leif, and the stickler Viking refused to bring her without their say-so.
It wasn’t what his father would have done, but Leif was willing to make the sacrifice for honor. Besides, there was another adventure on the horizon.
17. He Was A Royal Aide
After leaving his lover and child in the Hebrides, Leif finally landed in Norway and immediately began serving King Olaf. Being Leif, he likely took all his duties seriously and performed them diligently, all while taking in the sights and culture of his ancestral land. But Leif’s dedicated nature actually got him into more drama than not.
18. He Converted
At the time, King Olaf was something of a zealot for the Christian religion, and Norway was a Christian nation. The king introduced the Norse Vikings to the religion, and Leif reportedly found himself responding to it. He quickly converted body and soul to Christianity—so much so that Olaf asked him for an enormous favor.
19. He Was Pious
Seeing how devout his Viking vassal was, Olaf gave Leif a dangerous mission. He was to go back to the settlement in Greenland and convert as many of the settlers there as he could to Christianity. In this, Leif was particularly excited to convert his mother and his father to his new religion…but he was in for a nasty surprise.
20. His Father Rejected Him Right Back
When Leif did finally make it back to Greenland, he arrived with all the optimism of the newly converted and brought the good news to his parents. His father, however, was incensed at the suggestion: The hot-headed Erik was just fine with his Norse rituals, and wanted nothing to do with this new-fangled sect.
His mother, however, was another story.
21. He Started A Family Feud
Perhaps Leif’s mother was a little more like her son than his father, because she eagerly adopted the religion. In fact, she built the first Christian church in Greenland, much to Erik the Red’s displeasure. One saga even says that Leif’s new religion caused such a rift in the family, his mother began withholding intimacy from Erik the Red.
But Leif had little time for these troubles. He was about to become a legend.
22. He Went To A Strange Land
Sometime around this period—accounts vary about exactly when—Leif Erikson made the greatest discovery of his life. In one saga, in between Leif leaving Norway and landing in Greenland to spread the Word, bad winds forced him off course again, and set him down on a wholly unfamiliar shore.
When Leif and his crew disembarked, they made startling observations.
23. He Was Awed
Leif wasn’t just well-traveled; he came from a line of well-traveled men. Yet everything about this new shore seemed foreign. He and his crew witnessed what we’d now know as wild grapes, self-sown wheat, and maple trees. Astonished at these alien goods, they packed up their ship with samples to take back with them as they corrected course back to Greenland.
They had no idea what they just found—but history did.
24. He Was The First
Thanks to the wild grapes they found, Leif Erikson and his men dubbed the land “Vinland”. However, there is ample historical evidence that, in stumbling upon this unknown shore on the way to Greenland, Leif Erikson had actually found himself in present-day Newfoundland. This makes him, not Christopher Columbus, the first European in North America.
It also gave him a lasting nickname.
25. They Called Him Lucky
As news about Vinland spread, and furthermore as Leif’s precious Christianity spread, people couldn’t help but call Erik’s boy “Leif the Lucky”. After all, who else could be blown off course so many times, and still make such momentous discoveries? Who else could convince so many people to convert to a new religion?
Still, another version of events casts doubt on Leif’s “lucky” accomplishment.
26. He Knew What He Was Doing
According to an alternate version of events in another saga, Leif’s discovery of North America was no accident. Instead, some time earlier, fellow Norse explorer Bjarni Herjolfsson and his crew had already found North American shores, though they did not disembark on them. Hearing of their discovery, Leif went to Bjarni and made quite the proposition.
27. He May Not Have Been The First
Perhaps eager to stake his claim to new land, in this account Leif bought Bjarni’s ship, gathered his own men, and set out explicitly in search of the land that Bjarni had found by accident. If this is the true story, then Leif may have been the first European to set foot on North America, but it is Bjarni who found it first.
It’s not the only way things might have been different.
28. His Father Almost Came
In an alternate history, we might have had Leif Erikson’s spitfire father as the first European in North America. According to one report, Erik was all set to join his son on this voyage to Vinland, but fell off his horse while making his way toward the ship. Seeing the accident as a bad omen, Erik the Red dropped out, and robbed himself of glory.
29. He Didn’t Stay Long
Accounts also vary as to how much involvement Leif Erikson had in settling North America, if any. Though one has him merely collecting samples and never returning, another insists Leif had a hand in creating “Leifsbudir” (Leif’s Booths), a small settlement made after some forays into the country.
At some point, though, Leif’s involvement did end—but the cat was out of the bag.
30. His Brother Followed His Footsteps
After hearing about Vinland from Leif’s crew, many other Icelanders, Greenlanders, and Norse explorers began to try their luck with this alien coast. One explorer, Thorfinn Karlsefni, even followed Leif’s route, with Leif’s brother Thorvald in tow, in order to start a permanent settlement in the land.
This never came to fruition, but the events that did unfurl were heartbreaking.
31. His Successors Caused Trouble
When Thorfinn Karlsfeni and Leif’s brother landed in Vinland, they made discoveries Leif could have only imagined. Where Iceland and Greenland were mostly barren of people, Leif’s successors found Indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, like the Europeans who came after them, they treated the natives with contempt, giving them the name “wretches”.
They would get their comeuppance, but it would cost Leif a family member.
32. His Brother Met A Bloody End
After some less-than-ideal encounters with the Indigenous peoples of Vinland, including an attack on one of the Norse settlements that forced them to abandon it, Leif’s brother Thorvald had a confrontation with an Indigenous man. He should have run: The man promptly notched an arrow and shot it at Thorvald, killing him.
Exhausted and chastened, Karlsefni's crew soon returned to Greenland. When they did, they brought more than just this news with them.
33. They Kidnapped Children
After giving up on settling the already-occupied land, Karlsfeni still apparently wanted some token from his trip, and captured two Indigenous boys before leaving Vinland’s shores. He then took them back to Greenland, where Leif possibly had a chance to encounter them himself.
By then, however, his own native home was falling to ruin.
34. He Saved A Ship
Leif Erikson did have one last “lucky” moment after first setting foot in North America. According to more than one saga, on his return trip back to Greenland, he came across a stranded Icelandic crew and rescued them—another moment that went toward his “Leif the Lucky” nickname.
Yet while Leif saved this crew from a dark end, he couldn’t save his family.
35. Plague Came To His Home
Around 1000, Erik the Red’s Greenland settlement was prospering, and more and more immigrants were coming over. But one shipload carried doom. The new arrivals brought some kind of plague or epidemic with them, and the illness began ravaging the small, isolated colony. No one was safe.
36. His Father Died In Agony
Leif Erikson managed to be spared from the epidemic—another instance of his luck—but many of the community leaders were felled by the sickness. Including, tragically, his father Erik the Red. The brash man perished some time in the winter of 1002, along with so many of his countrymen.
It had far reaching consequences for Leif.
37. He Became Chief
With his father gone, Leif now had a grave responsibility on his shoulders: Taking over for Erik, he was now the main chieftain in the Greenland settlement. It was a role that could have easily contributed to the fact he never went back to Vinland again—and he soon found out how difficult it was to rule.
38. His Son Couldn’t Match Him
Leif Erikson sailed further than any Viking before him, creating a legacy that echoed through seaports for centuries—but his final chapter took a dark turn, and many of the problems he faced came from within his own family.
Sometime during Leif’s travels, his son from the Hebrides, Thorgis, came over to Greenland to lay claim to his birthright. It went worse than Leif could have imagined. For one reason or another, whether because he was a foreigner or because of some defect of his personality, Thorgis never truly blended in with the locals, and was widely unpopular.
He wasn’t the only black sheep of the family.
39. His Sister Was Feisty
Leif’s real trouble in ruling came, if you believe the sagas, in his sister Freydis. Taking more after their father than anyone, the ambitious Freydis asked Leif if she could go over to Vinland, seek her fortune, and make use of the structures Leif’s people had built there when she landed.
Leif, perhaps reluctantly, agreed. It was a disaster from beginning to end.
40. She Made A Claim On His Lands
Freydis took along two Icelandic brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, to split the work and any profits they made. She then promptly betrayed them: When they landed, she assumed the use of her brother's structures and kicked them out of shelter. Shortly after, she then goaded her husband into slaying them so she could take any profits for herself.
But Leif’s sister had worse up her sleeve.
41. His Family Couldn’t Escape Their Darkness
According to the saga that relates Freydis’s story, Leif’s sister then completed their family curse. While her husband had offed the brothers and their friends, he’d also left five women from their camp living, finding himself unable to slay a woman. So, Freydis channeled her father and grandfather and felled them with an axe herself.
When she got back to Leif and to Greenland, her lies only continued.
42. She Lied To His Face
Vinland was something of Iceland’s wild west, and Freydis thought she could quite literally get away with murder. When she came back to her brother’s realm without the two men she’d set out with, she told Leif that Helgi and Finnbogi, as well as the rest of their party, had simply decided to stay in Vinland.
Leif may have wanted to believe it, but the truth soon came out.
43. He Punished Her Men
Words and whispers traveled fast over the Atlantic, and Leif eventually learned of his sister’s sins. His response was brutal. He tormented three men who had come back with Freydis and forced them to confess all the goings-on in his newly-discovered land.
When it came to his sister, Leif’s actions were perhaps even more disturbing.
44. He Let Her Go Free
Although, at least according to the account we have, Freydis was the mastermind behind these dark deeds, Leif Erikson couldn’t find a way to truly punish her. He left off tormenting or even reprimanding his sister, saying only that he predicted her descendants would have "little prosperity”. This supposedly came true, but it was hardly a case of balanced karma.
Worst of all, Leif wasn’t around much longer to set it right.
45. He Passed In Obscurity
In the end, Leif got only spare years as Greenland’s chieftain: 1018 was the last year that anyone mentioned he was alive, and by 1025 sagas report that his son Thorkell, from a different mother than Thorgis, was now in charge of the settlement.
Unfortunately, that’s about all we know; for all his influence on how we understand Vikings, we know very little about Leif’s passing, nor about his descendants. But he certainly wasn’t forgotten.
46. His Legend Was Kept Alive
As the Norse went back and forth from Vinland in the coming years and centuries, the idea of a land west of Europe became more and more prevalent. Medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen even directly mentions it around 1075, more than three-quarters of a century after Leif found the land.
According to some, Vinland’s word-of-mouth reputation had big consequences.
47. Columbus May Have Copied Him
There’s no way of knowing for sure, but some historians suggest that the existence of Vinland was passed down from sailor to sailor in seaport after seaport, until none other than Christopher Columbus got wind of it before he sailed in 1492. After all, Columbus did claim to visit Iceland in 1477, and may have heard of it then.
It wasn’t the only way that Leif Erikson’s legend was stronger than his mortal frame.
48. His Settlement Stood
Although Leif Erikson toppled swiftly after his father’s own sudden death, their settlement in Iceland managed to cling on through decades of immense change on the European mainland. Pirates continually raided their coasts, Inuits began competing with them for land, and Norway abandoned it as a colony, but Iceland still stood and even thrived.
What felled them in the end was a cruel joke of nature.
49. His Home Iced Over
Beginning around the 16th century, Europe experienced a “Little Ice Age,” where temperatures plummeted thanks to a variety of factors. It was catastrophic for Leif’s home. Iceland’s glaciers grew to massive size, and extensive sea ice cut the settlements off from any shipments while crops failed around the land.
Suddenly, Iceland’s population was culled by half, and it never again experienced the same kind of prosperity it had under Leif and his father.
50. He’s Remembered Today
Today, Leif Erikson is everywhere in North American society, from the official “Leif Erikson Day” across America to his constant appearance in pop culture in shows like Vikings: Valhalla. He was a calm, steady man who understood how to navigate the dangerous waters of both the globe and his own people, and remains, along with his father, the epitome of the “Viking.”
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