Twice he lost his homeland. Twice he built himself a new one.<\/p>\n
Imagine: you are cast out of your country \u2013 not once, but twice. Most people would give up. Erik the Red instead founded a new land and gave it a name that lured settlers.<\/p>\n
Eirik the Red, son of Thorvald, was born around 950 in Rogaland, in western Norway. His father Thorvald Asvaldsson carried a dark history with him: around 960, he was banished from Norway for several killings. He took his son and fled to northwest Iceland. No farm awaited them there. Only a pattern awaited \u2013 one that would repeat itself.<\/p>\n
Around 982, Erik faced the same sentence his father once had: three years of exile, this time from Iceland. But he did not waste the time in grief. He used it to explore Greenland.<\/p>\n
Where others saw only the edge of the world, Erik saw coastlines without names. For three winters he sailed along the fjords, naming them one after another. To the whole land, he finally gave its most beautiful name: Greenland. The saga reveals the trick behind it: a good name lures settlers. And he was right. Twenty-five to thirty ships put to sea to follow his reputation. Only fourteen reached their destination. The sea claimed the rest.<\/p>\n
At the end of the Tunulliarfik Fjord, Erik built his settlement: Brattahlid, “the steep slope.” Its ruins still stand today. Since 2017, the site has been a UNESCO World Heritage location. Archaeologists found traces of three churches. The oldest bore the name of his wife: Thjodhild. Beneath the grass, a small turf church and around 150 graves were discovered \u2013 silent witnesses to a life that took root here.<\/p>\n
Erik was married to Thjodhild, the daughter of an Icelandic chieftain. The marriage produced several children who themselves became well-known figures of the Viking Age: the sons Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein, and the daughter Freydis. When Christianity reached Greenland, Thjodhild had herself baptized and had the small church built that still bears her name today \u2013 Erik himself, according to tradition, remained faithful to the old gods for the rest of his life. This religious divide within the family, the saga reports, caused tension between the couple.<\/p>\n
What we know about Erik comes chiefly from two Icelandic sagas, known together as the “Vinland Sagas”: the Saga of Erik the Red (Eiriks saga rauda) and the Saga of the Greenlanders (Graenlendinga saga). Both were composed only in the 13th century, some 200 to 300 years after the events they describe, and were passed down orally before being written down. The two texts contradict each other on several points \u2013 including the order of the Greenland expeditions and the question of who first sighted the coast of North America. Historians therefore read them not as an exact record but as a literary-shaped memory of a real settlement history.<\/p>\n