982–986
Erik the Red and Greenland, 982–986
Erik Thorvaldsson, called the Red, comes to Iceland as a boy when his father is banished from Norway for manslaughter. He kills men in feuds, first in Haukadalur and then on the islands of Breiðafjörður over his father’s high-seat pillars, and around 982 the Thorsnes Thing outlaws him for three years.
Erik the Red in a woodcut from Arngrímur Jónsson’s Gronlandia, printed in Iceland in 1688Wikimedia Commons, Arngrímur Jónsson, Public domain (Eric the Red.png)
Erik sails west to a land that Gunnbjörn Ulfsson had sighted when driven off course and that Snæbjörn galti had tried and failed to settle a few years before. By Eiríks saga rauða he rounds the southern cape, now Cape Farewell, and spends his three years exploring the west coast, wintering first on Eiriksey. Back in Iceland he calls the land Greenland, saying that people would go there if it had a good name.
A Norse ship off the coast of Greenland about the year 1000, a painting by Carl Rasmussen of 1875Wikimedia Commons, Carl Rasmussen, Public domain (I. E. C. Rasmussen - Sommernat under den Grønlandske Kyst circa Aar 1000.jpg)
In 985 or 986 Erik leads 25 ships of settlers from Iceland, and 14 arrive, the others turning back or being lost. The settlers take up the only two areas of the south-west coast fit for farming: the Eastern Settlement around today’s Qaqortoq, where Erik builds his farm Brattahlíð at the head of Eriksfjord, and the Western Settlement at the head of the long fjord inland from today’s Nuuk.
At its height the Eastern Settlement has about 500 farms, 16 churches and 4,000 to 5,000 people, and the Western Settlement about 95 farms and 1,000 people. Each summer men sail north to Disko Bay to hunt seals and walrus for their ivory. Erik’s wife Þjóðhildr builds a small church at Brattahlíð, whose remains are found in 1961, while Erik stays pagan and dies in an epidemic about 1003.
Modern reconstruction of Þjóðhildr’s church at Brattahlíð, with Eriksfjord behindWikimedia Commons, Hamish Laird, Public domain (Brattachurch.jpg)
Sources
- Eiríks saga rauða and Grænlendinga saga, 13th century.
- Kirsten A. Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000–1500 (1996).
- Jørgen Meldgaard, Tjodhildes Kirke – den første fundberetning (1982).
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