The Vikings’ Discovery of Greenland

The Norse found Greenland by accident. Around 900, Gunnbjörn Úlfsson, a Norwegian on his way to Iceland, drifted off course and sighted a new land to the west. That sighting was the Norse discovery of Greenland, yet for almost a century, nobody followed up. Then along came Eirik the Red, outlawed from Iceland for three years after a string of killings, looking for somewhere to spend his exile.

Eirik the Red Sails to Greenland

Around 982, Eirik and a few followers sailed west and spent his three years of exile exploring the coast. In the south they found no one living, only the ruins of earlier peoples. The ancestors of today’s Inuit, the Thule people, had not yet arrived; they spread east across the Arctic over the following two centuries, and Norse and Inuit probably did not meet until the 1200s.

Then Eirik went home to recruit. In a stroke of marketing genius, he called the place “Greenland,” because, as the sagas put it, people would be more eager to go if the land had a good name. Around 985, twenty-five ships set out with settlers. Only fourteen arrived; the rest went missing or turned back. They sailed in the ocean-going knarr, not the longship.

Vikings in Greenland After the Discovery

Archaeologists have found the remains of some 500 farms in the Eastern Settlement, with more in the smaller Western Settlement. Eirik’s farm at Brattahlíð was the community’s social and political heart. There they have found his house, and a tiny church for his wife, Thjódhild, who converted to Christianity. The sagas say Eirik did not.

The Greenland colony would last nearly 500 years, and it became the launching point for voyages to North America, to L’Anse aux Meadows. One remarkable woman made that journey, and her story is in our post on Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, the Viking woman who traveled the world. The settlement’s dates are on our Viking Timeline.