Leif Eriksson
Leif Eriksson was a Norse explorer who reached North America around the year 1000, roughly five centuries before Columbus. Born in Iceland around 970, he was the son of Erik the Red, who had been exiled from Norway and then from Iceland for killings and who founded the Norse settlement in Greenland around 985. He grew up in Greenland, and according to the Saga of the Greenlanders he sailed to Norway around 999, where King Olaf Tryggvason converted him to Christianity and charged him with bringing the religion back — his mother Thjodhild built Greenland's first church, and Erik the Red refused to convert. The two sagas disagree about how he reached the west. In one he sailed deliberately after hearing the account of Bjarni Herjólfsson, who had been blown off course and sighted land without going ashore; in the other he was driven off course himself. He described three regions: Helluland, a place of flat stones, generally identified with Baffin Island; Markland, forested, probably Labrador; and Vinland, where he wintered, named for grapes or possibly for meadows. The sagas were written down two or three centuries later and were long treated as legend. In 1960 the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad excavated L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland and found eight turf buildings, a smithy and Norse artefacts including a bronze cloak pin — physical proof of a Norse presence in the Americas. Tree-ring analysis of felled timber published in 2021 dated activity there precisely to 1021. He did not settle Vinland; later attempts, including his brother Thorvald's, met resistance from indigenous peoples the Norse called Skrælingar. He probably died around 1020.
- Lived: 970 CE – 1020 CE
- Nationality: Norse
- Roles: explorer
