Erik the Red

Erik Thorvaldsson was born around 950 CE in the Jaeren district of southwestern Norway, in what is now Rogaland ^[1]. The sagas that preserve his story, chiefly the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, were written down in Iceland during the thirteenth century, more than two hundred years after the events they describe. Historians treat their details with caution, but the broad outline of Erik's life is supported by archaeology and by the continuous Norse presence in Greenland that followed him ^[2].

His byname, the Red, most likely referred to the color of his hair and beard, though some later readers have connected it to his temper. Both explanations fit the man the sagas portray: striking in appearance and quick to answer an insult with violence.

Erik left Norway as a boy. His father, Thorvald Asvaldsson, was outlawed for manslaughter, and the family sailed west to Iceland, which Norse settlers had been colonizing since the 870s ^[1]. By the time they arrived, the best land along the coasts had already been claimed. The family settled at Drangar in the Hornstrandir region of the northwest, a harsh and marginal district. That early experience of arriving too late for good land shaped the rest of Erik's career.

After his father died, Erik married Thjodhild Jorundsdottir and moved south to the Haukadal valley, where he cleared a farm called Eiriksstadir ^[3]. Excavations near modern Budardalur in western Iceland have uncovered the remains of a small Viking Age turf longhouse traditionally identified with this farm, and a reconstruction now stands nearby ^[3].

His time in Haukadal ended in bloodshed. According to the sagas, Erik's slaves caused a landslide that damaged a neighbor's property. A kinsman of the neighbor killed the slaves, and Erik killed him in return, along with another man. The local assembly banished him from the district ^[1]. He moved to the island of Oxney in Breidafjord, but trouble followed. A dispute over borrowed household beams, the carved seat posts that Norse families prized, escalated into another fight in which Erik killed two more men, including the sons of a man named Thorgest ^[2].

At the Thorsnes assembly, probably in 982, Erik was sentenced to lesser outlawry: three years of exile from Iceland ^[1]. A man in his position could not return to Norway, where his family record offered no welcome. Instead he chose a third direction. Decades earlier, a sailor named Gunnbjorn Ulfsson had been blown off course and sighted skerries far west of Iceland ^[4]. Erik fitted out a ship and sailed toward that rumor.

Erik spent his three years of exile, roughly 982 to 985, exploring the coast of the landmass west of Iceland ^[1]. He rounded Cape Farewell at its southern tip and worked north along the western shore, where deep fjords cut into land that, during the relatively warm climate of the tenth century, offered grass, dwarf willow, and sheltered anchorages ^[4]. He wintered at several sites, naming landmarks as he went and marking out territory he intended to claim.

When the exile ended he returned to Iceland and began recruiting settlers. The sagas record his famous piece of marketing: he called the new country Greenland, reasoning that people would be more eager to go there if the place had an attractive name ^[1]. The choice was shrewd rather than dishonest. The inner fjords of the southwest really were green in summer, and Iceland in the 980s was crowded and had recently suffered famine, so the promise of free land found an audience ^[2].

In about 985 or 986, a fleet of 25 ships left Iceland under Erik's leadership. The crossing was brutal. According to the Book of the Icelanders, an early twelfth century history by Ari Thorgilsson, only 14 ships arrived; the rest sank or turned back ^[5]. Even so, several hundred colonists landed and began building farms. It was the first European settlement on Greenland, and it made Erik, a twice-outlawed killer, the founding father of a new society.

Erik claimed the best land in the region for himself, establishing his estate at Brattahlid (the steep slope) at the head of Eriksfjord, near the modern settlement of Qassiarsuk ^[4]. The colony organized itself into two districts: the Eastern Settlement around Erik's fjord in the southwest, and the smaller Western Settlement further up the coast near present day Nuuk. At its height the Norse population of Greenland probably numbered a few thousand people ^[2].

As the first settler and the man who had distributed the land, Erik held the position of paramount chieftain. The settlers lived much as they had in Iceland, raising cattle, sheep, and goats, supplementing their farms with seal hunting and caribou. Greenland's real wealth lay in walrus ivory, which the colonists exported to Europe, where it was carved into luxury goods ^[6]. Archaeological work at Qassiarsuk has revealed the foundations of longhouses, byres, and a tiny turf church associated with the Brattahlid estate ^[4].

Erik's authority was personal rather than institutional. Greenland had no king. Disputes were settled at an assembly, and Erik's standing rested on his land, his kinship network, and the fact that every settler owed the colony's existence to him. For roughly fifteen years he presided over a community that he had conjured out of exile.

Erik and Thjodhild raised three sons, Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein, and Erik also had a daughter named Freydis ^[1]. The children carried the family's westward momentum further than their father ever did. Leif Erikson sailed beyond Greenland around the year 1000 and reached the coast of North America, landing at a place he called Vinland. The Norse presence there is confirmed by the excavated site at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, a UNESCO World Heritage location ^[7]. Thorvald and Freydis later joined voyages to Vinland as well.

The sagas say Erik intended to join Leif's expedition but fell from his horse while riding to the ship and took the accident as a bad omen, so he stayed home ^[1]. Whatever the truth of the anecdote, Erik never saw the lands his son found.

Religion divided the household in his final years. Leif returned from a stay in Norway as a Christian, reportedly commissioned by King Olaf Tryggvason to convert Greenland. Thjodhild embraced the new faith and had a small church built at Brattahlid, set apart from the farmhouse. Erik refused baptism and held to the old gods, and the Saga of Erik the Red claims Thjodhild refused to live with him as a wife afterward ^[1]. Excavations at Qassiarsuk in the 1960s uncovered the remains of a tiny turf chapel and an associated graveyard, widely identified as Thjodhild's church ^[4].

Erik remained at Brattahlid as the colony matured around him. New farms spread along the fjords, trade links with Iceland and Norway carried ivory, hides, and falcons east in exchange for timber, iron, and grain, and the settlement he had founded on a gamble looked increasingly permanent ^[6].

He died at Brattahlid around 1003, not long after Leif's return from Vinland. The Saga of the Greenlanders connects his death to an epidemic that swept the colony during the winter after a new group of settlers arrived ^[1]. He was probably in his early fifties. As a pagan he would not have been buried in the churchyard his wife had established, and no grave identified as his has ever been found.

The colony outlived its founder by a remarkable stretch. Norse Greenland endured for almost 500 years, acquiring a bishop's seat at Gardar in 1126 and formally joining the Norwegian crown in 1261. The settlements faded in the fifteenth century, for reasons scholars still debate: a cooling climate, the collapse of the ivory trade, isolation from Europe, and competition with the Thule Inuit have all been proposed ^[2].

Any Erik the Red biography has to reckon with a double reputation. On one side is the outlaw, a man banished from two countries for killing. On the other is the founder, the explorer who charted an unknown coast, named a country, and organized one of the boldest colonizing ventures of the Middle Ages. Both portraits are accurate, and together they explain who was Erik the Red better than either alone: a man for whom exile was not an ending but a supply of new coastlines ^[2].

Among Erik the Red achievements, the founding of the Greenland colony ranks first. It extended the Norse world to the edge of North America and set up his son's voyages to Vinland, the earliest documented European contact with the American continent, five centuries before Columbus ^[7]. The medieval texts that preserve his story, the Saga of Erik the Red, the Saga of the Greenlanders, and Ari Thorgilsson's Book of the Icelanders, remain central sources for the whole age of Norse expansion ^[5].

His name survives on the land itself. Eriksfjord is now Tunulliarfik Fjord, but Qassiarsuk preserves the ruins of Brattahlid, and in 2017 UNESCO inscribed the surrounding district, Kujataa, as a World Heritage landscape recognizing both Norse and Inuit farming cultures ^[8]. A reconstruction of his Icelandic longhouse stands at Eiriksstadir, and statues of Erik and Leif look over the fjord he settled. For a man whose career began with a sentence of outlawry, the geography of the North Atlantic reads like his memorial. The basic Erik the Red facts, exile, exploration, and settlement, describe one of the Viking Age's most consequential lives.