The Vikings’ Discovery of Greenland

Greenland was discovered by accident. Around 900, a Norwegian named Gunnbjörn Úlfsson was blown off course on his way to Iceland and sighted a new land to the west. 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 were lost or turned back.

Vikings in Greenland

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 built 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. Read how one remarkable woman made that journey in our post on Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir.