The Norse Outlaw Who Founded Greenland Because He'd Been Banished From Iceland

Erik the Red (Old Norse Eirikr Þorvaldsson) was born in western Norway around 950 to a minor landholding family whose patriarch — Erik’s father Thorvald Asvaldsson — had been exiled from Norway around 960 “because of some killings” (the Icelandic saga’s polite phrase). The Thorvald family settled in northwestern Iceland; Erik was approximately ten years old at the move. He grew up Icelandic, married a daughter of the local landholding aristocracy, and built a substantial farm at Eiriksstadir in the Haukadalur valley.

Around 980 he killed two men in a property dispute. He was exiled by the local Icelandic district court for three years. He could not safely live in Iceland during the term of the exile. He could not safely return to Norway (the Thorvald family exile was substantively still in effect). He decided to spend the three years exploring the substantial unknown territory that Icelandic mariners had reported sighting in the western Atlantic over the previous several decades.

The unknown territory was Greenland. The 982–985 exploration was the first sustained Norse reconnaissance of the world’s largest island. The 985 settler expedition that followed was the foundational event of the Norse Greenland colony — a substantial human presence on the island that would persist for approximately 470 years before its final disappearance around 1450.

The exploration

Erik sailed west from Iceland in spring 982 with a crew and provisions for the three years of his exile. The Icelandic mariners had been reporting western-Atlantic land sightings since at least 900 — the earliest documented account is Gunnbjörn Ulfsson’s observation of small skerries (now called the Gunnbjørn Skerries) off the eastern Greenland coast around 950 — but no Norseman before Erik had attempted sustained exploration of the territory.

Erik reached the eastern Greenland coast at approximately the latitude of modern Ammassalik. The eastern coast was, then as now, ice-bound for most of the year and substantively unsuitable for Norse-pattern farming settlement. He rounded Cape Farewell at the southern tip of the island and explored the southwestern Greenland coastline through the summers of 982, 983, and 984. The southwestern coast was substantively warmer and substantially more habitable: deep fjords with grass-covered shorelines, reasonable summer temperatures, ice-free water through the summer shipping season, and fishing and seal-hunting potential.

Erik identified two habitable regions: the Eystribyggð (“Eastern Settlement”) around the modern town of Qaqortoq, and the Vestribyggð (“Western Settlement”) about 500 kilometres northwest near the modern town of Nuuk. The two settlement regions were separated by approximately a week of coastal sailing. Both regions had reasonable Norse-pattern farming potential — sheep, goats, some cattle, limited grain (mostly barley), fishing — in the warm climate conditions of the Medieval Climate Anomaly that prevailed in the late 10th and 11th centuries.

The naming

Erik returned to Iceland in spring 985, his three-year exile completed. He spent the following autumn and winter organising a settler expedition. The substantive recruitment pitch was based on the name he had chosen for the new territory: Grœnland, “Greenland.” The Icelandic sagas record his explicit reasoning: “He gave it that name because, he said, men would be more inclined to go there if it had a favourable name.” It is the earliest documented case of deliberate real-estate marketing in European history.

The naming worked. Approximately 700 Icelandic colonists sailed from Iceland in summer 986 (one year later than the sources sometimes state) in 25 ships. The voyage was substantially difficult — a summer storm in the Denmark Strait sank 11 ships and forced 3 more to return to Iceland; only 11 ships of the original 25 reached Greenland — but approximately 350 settlers established the Eastern Settlement community at Erik’s chosen site of Brattahlíð in the inner Eiriksfjord. Additional settlers in subsequent years brought the total Norse Greenland population to a peak of approximately 2,500–5,000 over the following century.

The colony

The Norse Greenland community is one of the most-studied medieval European colonial settlements, because its substantially-documented rise and decline provides a controlled case study of medieval European demographic and economic processes under environmental stress. The archaeological reconstruction at Brattahlíð (the modern Qassiarsuk), at the Eastern Settlement bishopric of Garðar (the modern Igaliku), and at the Western Settlement sites (the modern Sandnes area) has produced one of the densest medieval-European archaeological records anywhere in the world.

The substantive Norse Greenland economic base was a mixed-farming pattern (sheep and goats for wool, dairy, and meat; fishing; seal-hunting; walrus-tusk export to the medieval European luxury market). The Greenland walrus-tusk export was substantially the major commercial economic resource of the colony — European ivory imports through the medieval period came substantially from Greenland.

The decline of the Norse Greenland colony through the 14th and 15th centuries is one of the most-studied historical-environmental questions in medieval European history. The contributing factors:

The climate deterioration of the Little Ice Age beginning around 1300, which substantially shortened the Greenland growing season and substantially expanded the summer sea-ice cover in the shipping channels between Greenland and Iceland.

The collapse of the walrus-tusk export market in the late 14th century, driven by the reopening of African and Arctic-Russian ivory supply chains to European luxury-import markets. The decline of the Norse Greenland export revenue substantially undermined the colony’s capacity to import the European manufactured goods (iron, weapons, church-vestments) on which it had depended.

The Norse Greenland population abandoned the Western Settlement by approximately 1350 and declined to a small remnant by approximately 1450. The last documented Norse Greenland event — a wedding ceremony at the Hvalsey Church in the Eastern Settlement on 16 September 1408 — marks the last confirmed contact between Norse Greenland and Iceland. The colony had vanished by approximately 1450.

After

Erik the Red himself had died at Brattahlíð around 1003 of an unspecified illness, aged approximately 53. His son Leif Erikson had sailed from Greenland around 1000 and reached the North American mainland at L’Anse aux Meadows in modern Newfoundland — the first documented European contact with the Americas, almost five centuries before Columbus. The Vinland exploration produced three Norse settler attempts on the Newfoundland coast through the early 11th century; all were abandoned within a decade because of conflict with the Indigenous population (the Norse called them Skraelings — substantively the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq peoples of modern Atlantic Canada).

The Norse Greenland settlements were rediscovered by the Danish Lutheran missionary Hans Egede in 1721. Egede had spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast searching for surviving descendants of Erik’s colony — Christians whose religious practice would presumably have continued through three unrecorded centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit. The 1408 Hvalsey wedding had been the last documented contact; everything after that had been silence. The colony Erik the Red had named, settled, and made commercially viable had outlived its founder by approximately four and a half centuries and then quietly ended.