Early medieval Europe (500–1000)Travel and discovery

Leif Erikson reaches Vinland

Sailing west from Greenland, the Norseman Leif Erikson reached lands he named Helluland, Markland and Vinland; the Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only confirmed trace of Europeans in America before Columbus.

Date: c. 1000year known, approximate
Place: L’Anse aux Meadowstoday: Newfoundland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada · North America
Route: Brattahlíð (Greenland) → Helluland (Baffin Island?) → Markland (Labrador?) → L’Anse aux Meadows
Participants: Leif Erikson, Vikings
Threads: Early medieval Europe (500–1000)
Also known as: Vinland; Винланд; Norse colonization of North America; Норманнское открытие Америки; Leifsbúðir

The voyage is known from two Icelandic sagas written down around 1200, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, which differ in their details. According to the first, Leif, son of the founder of the Greenland colony, Erik the Red, bought the ship of Bjarni Herjólfsson, who had sighted an unknown coast years before, and sailed with 35 men past a land of flat stones (Helluland) and a forested land (Markland) to a country with grapes and salmon, where he built houses and wintered. The date is usually given as around 1000.

Further expeditions by Leif’s brothers Thorvald and Thorstein and by Thorfinn Karlsefni ended in conflict with the natives, whom the Norse called skrælingar, and the settlement was abandoned. In the 1960s Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated a Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows; in 2021 tree rings with a solar-storm marker dated wood cut there with metal tools to the year 1021.

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Related events

Christianization of Icelandbetween 999 and 1000 · Western and Central EuropeAccording to the sagas, Leif had been converted by Olaf Tryggvason and sent to preach in Greenland