Erik the Red
Erik the Red was outlawed from Norway and then from Iceland for killings, used the three years of the second sentence to explore the coast of the largest island in the world, and came back with a name for it chosen to attract settlers; the colony he founded lasted five hundred years, and his son reached America from it. He was born in the Jaeren district of Norway about 950, the son of a Thorvald who was exiled for manslaughter and took the boy to Iceland, where the good land was already taken. Erik married, farmed in the west, and killed neighbours in two feuds, over thralls who had started a landslide and over some bench-boards he had lent and wanted back; the Thorsnes assembly outlawed him for three years, about 982. He sailed west for the land a man named Gunnbjorn had sighted, rounded the southern cape, found fjords with grass at their heads and no people, and spent the three winters going up the west coast. He went home to Iceland in 985 to say that a country called Greenland was open, the sagas recording that he thought people would go there if it had a good name. Twenty-five ships sailed with him in 986 and fourteen arrived. He took the best fjord for himself, called the farm Brattahlid, and was the colony's chieftain without a title for the rest of his life. His wife Thjodhild took the Christianity that his son Leif brought from Norway around 1000, built a church out of sight of his door, and, the saga says, would not sleep with him while he stayed heathen. He meant to sail with Leif to the land Bjarni Herjolfsson had seen to the west, fell from his horse on the way to the ship and took it as an omen, and stayed; Leif found Vinland without him. He died in the epidemic that a ship brought to the settlement about 1003. The Eastern Settlement he founded had three thousand people at its height and was empty by the fifteenth century, which nobody has fully explained.
- Lived: 950 CE – 1003 CE
- Nationality: Norse
- Roles: explorer, chieftain
