For all the dominant attitude found in the introductions to the Íslenzk fornrit series and elsewhere of placing the overriding emphasis on the part of individual authors in the creation of the sagas, there has always been a strong tendency to link the events described with some kind of external historical reality, for instance in the matter of chronology. Where sources differ there has often been much scholarly speculation about which is likely to be closer to the truth and saga writers have frequently been accused of interpreting their sources incorrectly, as exemplified several times in the previous chapters. In such cases we have no reliable or agreed ways of determining which account should be taken in preference to any other. The aesthetics of presentation, and the sheer length of time that elapsed between the events and the texts that describe them, mean that it is perfectly natural to harbor considerable reservations about the relationship between the sagas and truth. When we add to this the fact that stories and other information preserved orally is subject to constant change according to the demands of the present—as we see, for example, with Landnámabók (see Rafnsson 1974:125-214)—we are duty-bound to be extremely tentative about using the Icelandic sagas as sources for anything other than literary history.

These kinds of doubts over the source value of the sagas, which revolve largely around the nature of the texts and academic theorization on the relationship between history and truth, have been music to the ears of the archaeological community. Many archaeologists have argued that the patent unreliability of the sagas makes them worthless as historical sources and that they should therefore be rejected en masse; that the times they describe should be treated to all intents and purposes as prehistory and, if we are interested in truth, amenable only to the verifiable methods of archaeology (see for instance Vésteinsson 1998:1-2).

It is easy enough to point to much in the sagas of Icelanders that cannot possibly have happened in anything like the way the sagas say it did—at any rate, not when viewed against our modern understanding of the real world and what is possible in it. Grettir, for example, can hardly have lived among trolls in Þórisdalur as we read in Grettis saga; Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi can hardly have jumped more than his own height wearing full battle gear as it says in Njáls saga; and we have every reason to be more than a little skeptical about the account in Bárðar saga of Helga Bárðardóttir drifting on an ice floe all the way across to Greenland. But this does not mean that we should throw the baby out with the bath water and reject all the texts out of hand as potential sources for what happened in the past. Rather than approaching Landnámabók and the sagas with an eye to picking out matters that appear dubious or cannot be true, and then using these as grounds to reject the texts as sources entirely, it is possible to turn the matter on its head and ask instead: What might be correct, or at least somewhere along the right lines, in the sagas and records from the 13th century so far as events of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries are concerned?

Great events only become great events when someone tells about them or puts them into a story. Mainly in the 12th and 13th centuries, the oral poetry and storytelling tradition of the Icelanders became the basis for a literature that preserved memories reaching back to the Viking Age (800-1050), when the peoples of Scandinavia used their superb ships to sail east across the Baltic and into Russia and expand their power and influence all the way south to the Caspian Sea and Constantinople. Others turned their attention to Western Europe and crossed the North Sea to the British Isles, raiding and establishing colonies in York, Dublin, the Scottish islands, and elsewhere. In stages these men ventured farther out into the Atlantic and discovered the Faeroe Islands and Iceland, places that hitherto had been visited only sporadically by Irish hermits. About a hundred years after the settlement of Iceland, people whom we can now call Icelanders continued on to Greenland and eventually all the way to the mainland of North America, to places to which they gave the names Helluland, Markland, and Vínland. The voyages to Vínland took place some two hundred years after the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England in 793, the event that marks the beginning of the Viking Age. These vikings were a fearsome race, combining trade, pillage, and warfare with a search for new lands to explore, settle, and govern. For most of the period that bears their name they were successful wherever they went, but little by little their resources and lines of communication became stretched and eventually overstretched when they came into contact with the indigenous peoples of North America some thousand years ago. After a few years of attempted settlement these adventurers were forced to concede and withdrew back across the ocean, thereby postponing the Iron Age in North America by some 500 years.

The sagas that were written in medieval Iceland extend across the entire world known to the peoples of Scandinavia at the time, from the Caspian and Constantinople in the east to Vínland in the west. People in Iceland were happy to record stories set in parts of the world they knew of only by hearsay. Tempting as it may be to use these sagas as sources of Viking Age history, the whole area is beset with enormous problems. Historians have, with every justification, shown that the sagas contain considerable elements of fantasy and exaggeration and much that is patently untrue—as, for example, when the hero Ǫrvar-Oddr is said to have lived for 300 years. It is clear that their creators often had recourse to legendary and adventure motifs to fill in gaps where their knowledge failed. For instance, the account in Heimskringla described below of Haraldr harðráði’s travels in the south and service in the Varangian Guard is packed with fantasy and improbable adventures that might easily be dismissed as pure fiction, typical Märchen material. The problem is that to do so would be wrong—the core of the story, as can be shown from contemporary and independent sources, is based on hard fact.

So far as the external framework of the story goes, this source brings us very close to Snorri’s account in Heimskringla, though of course it lacks the legendary motifs that we find interwoven into the saga. The example proves that, for all its fantasy and adventure, Haralds saga can also serve as some kind of source for past events even if it does not present us with the truth whole and unvarnished. It is all very well to doubt the source value of the sagas, but we should not do so at the cost of recognizing that they can, despite everything, have an extraordinarily close relationship to reality; that is, to the reality we reckon we can approach through alternative means, whether contemporary sources from elsewhere or archaeological discoveries.

Haraldr harðráði’s time in Constantinople thus supplies evidence of travels and service in the east that can be verified from external sources. The same is to some extent true of the journey of Yngvarr víðfǫrli (‘the Wide-Traveled’) (see Snædal, Þ. 1997). Yngvars saga is preserved in manuscripts from around 1400 and later and is reckoned to date from the 14th century. The saga is highly fantastic in character, although at the end the writer makes great play of his sources and informants, claiming that everything he has said derives ultimately from the king of Sweden (see Hofmann 1981). The saga tells of a journey made by a Swede called Yngvarr Eymundsson with thirty ships through Garðaríki (i.e. Russia) and lands to the east during the years 1036-41. Only the most credulous would be inclined to place much faith in the story as it is related were it not for the existence of some thirty runestones in the area around Lake Mälaren in central Sweden dedicated to people who lost their lives on an expedition into Asia with Yngvarr, mostly from a disease which the saga links to heathen women they slept with on the way (see Jansson 1987:63-69, Wessén 1960:30-46). So, fantastic and legendary though the account may be, there can be no doubt that this voyage actually took place. Omeljan Pritsak (1981:423-460) has even established that many of the ethnographic and historical details in the saga make sense in view of sources from Asia. Much the same can be said about the work of the Swedish scholar Mats Larsson (1983, 1990, 1996), who has managed to correlate the descriptions in the saga with the facts of the geography of western Asia. The expedition seems to have set off along the customary route south by boat down the river Dnieper to the Black Sea, and then moved east up the river Rion to the city of Kutaisi, through the inhospitable terrain of the high Caucasus to the river Kura and the city of Tbilisi, and then down to the Caspian Sea and on as far as Khorezm on the Oxus. By good fortune we have historical sources from the Kingdom of Georgia that are not incompatible with the saga account, describing a power struggle between a pair of brothers around the year 1040 in which Varangians were involved. As well as constituting an interface between legend and historical truth, it is worth bearing in mind that the saga was written primarily as a travel book and as such is in some ways comparable with the sagas that tell of the Norse journeys west across the Atlantic to Vínland (see Andersson 2000:26-8).

Other evidence suggestive of very ancient historical elements in the sagas comes from the conclusions that have been drawn from the most impressive archaeological finds of Viking-Age Norway, the Gokstad and Oseberg ship-burials, in the light of the details given in Heimskringla about the Norwegian royal family of the 9th century. In 1880 a Viking longship dating from the second half of the 9th century was uncovered from a burial mound at Gokstad in Vestfold on the Oslo Fjord. The skeleton in the mound showed signs of a crippling condition of the leg, and some have seen in this a connection with the figure of King Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr who, according to Snorri, was described in an early poem by Þjóðólfr úr Hvíni as suffering from severe leg pains. Óláfr was the stepson of Queen Ása, the daughter of King Haraldr inn granrauði (‘the Red-Moustached’) mentioned in Heimskringla and the grandmother of Haraldr hárfagri (see Jones 1984:84-5). This Queen Ása has often been identified with the occupant of the Oseberg ship discovered in 1903 in a mound at Oseberg, also by the Oslo Fjord in Vestfold. The ship in question was twenty-two meters (seventy-two feet) long and built around 800, and formed the centerpiece of the lavishly furnished burial of a woman clearly of chieftainly class, together with a slave woman, some time in the middle years of the 9th century.

These connections are of course extremely tentative. No modern-day Norwegian archaeologist would lay his neck on the line and state categorically that the skeletons found in the ship- burials are those of the characters mentioned in the sagas; there is simply too much inconsistency in the saga accounts and too much confusion about the family relationships for such identifications to hold water in the hard world of archaeology. By their very nature, the written sources cannot provide information on individual chieftains who lived in 9th-century Norway that is accurate down to the year or decade. It is remarkable enough that 13th-century Icelanders should have retained any memory at all of the names of people who had lived 400 years earlier and recorded these memories in organized fashion in their books. Even if the stories told of Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr and his crippled leg and Queen Ása cannot stand up to conventional source criticism, it is astonishing in itself that any kind of connection can be made between them and the remarkable graves from the very time and place where these people were said to have lived their real lives on earth.

Allowing for a degree of simplification, it may be said that the accounts given in the Icelandic sagas of the main events of the Viking Age, in so far as they affect Iceland, are in all main respects correct. The written sources describe a comparatively rapid settlement of the country from about 870 onwards under the leadership of chieftains who came both direct from Norway and from the Norwegian colonies in the British Isles and established a few hundred large estates and around 3,000 farms. All this is confirmed by modern-day archaeology. The dating is secure in the light of the so-called ‘settlement layer’ of volcanic ash which extends over a large part of the country. This layer was the result of an eruption in 871 (± 1 year), as confirmed by ice-core samples from the Greenland icecap, and immediately above it are found the remains of the oldest habitation in Iceland (see Vésteinsson 1998). The writers of the sources were also fully aware that Greenland had been settled by people from Iceland in the last years of the 10th century. Likewise, people knew stories about sailings to the North American continent around the year 1000, voyages confirmed by remains left by people from Greenland and Iceland and uncovered since the 1960s at L’Anse aux Meadows at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland (see p. 000). The saga writers were also, rightly, aware that at the time of the settlement the dominant religion was the Norse heathendom but that around the year 1000 this had changed with the adoption by law of Christianity. All this was known because people preserved stories about these events in their memories; these stories were told from man to man and particular events were associated with the names and lineages of certain individuals. As a natural result of the inherent properties of narrative art and oral tradition, various details must inevitably have strayed from the strait and narrow path of truth over the course of time. This, however, does nothing to invalidate the general picture, a picture fully consistent with the evidence gleaned by archaeologists. None of this could have been made up by the saga writers on the basis of literary models and sources brought in from continental Europe or the lands of the Mediterranean. So there is no avoiding the fact that the sagas constitute independent sources for these times, a fact that is in no way compromised by the presence in the sagas of material that a modern scientific outlook would reject as farfetched or impossible.

Vegetation and climate. Various incidental details mentioned in the ancient sources regarding vegetation and climate have also been verified through modern methods of research. For instance, Ari fróði’s statement in Íslendingabók that at the time of the settlement Iceland was ‘viði vaxit á miðli fjalls ok fjǫru’ (‘wooded between mountain and shoreline’) has been shown on the evidence of paleobotanical research to have been in all probability true, the woods in question having consisted chiefly of birch trees and scrub (see Einarsson, E. and Gíslason, E. 2000). Ice-core sampling on the Greenland icecap has provided us with a range of valuable information about climatic conditions and temperature fluctuations in former times. Research in this area has made it possible to go through the past year by year and extract details of temperature, precipitation, volcanic eruptions, and other factors as if we had access to some kind of natural diary. For instance, from such sources we now know that only shortly before the start of the settlements around 870 the climate of Iceland was much colder than in subsequent periods, much as it was in the late 17th century when the country was surrounded by ice floes reaching all the way to the Faeroes. This mini ice age coincides well with the story in Landnámabók about Hrafna-Flóki and how Iceland got its name. Previously, doubts had been expressed about this story on the grounds that Flóki was unlikely to have seen large amounts of sea ice from the mountains above Flókalundur on Breiðafjörður in the west where he spent his first winter in Iceland. However, these new findings have dispelled all such doubts, showing that such a scene was altogether plausible in the middle years of the 9th century. After around 860 temperatures began to rise and during the 10th century the climate was rather warmer than it is nowadays. Glaciological research also tends to support the saga accounts of the settlement of Greenland; in 985, the probable year of Eiríkr rauði’s emigration, seasonal conditions had been good for an entire century and vegetation was then at its historical high point, with wide expanses of birch scrub in low-lying areas providing favorable farming conditions for settlers from Iceland. By the middle of the 14th century the climate had become much colder, and this may in part account for the abandonment of the Western Settlement around the year 1350 (see Sveinbjörnsdóttir 1993:106).

Heathens and Christians. When we turn to the religious background to the settlement period, however, there appears to be a degree of contradiction among the sources. The general impression given is of a land that was entirely heathen up to the year 1000, when the Icelanders as a body accepted Christianity. However, the sources do say that many of those who came to Iceland from the colonies in the British Isles were Christian, although Scandinavian culture and heathendom were dominant in Iceland from the earliest days. According to Landnámabók, these Christians settled particularly in the west and south, which accords well with the inferences that can be drawn from the distribution of the place name Breiðabólstaður, which is found only in the Norse colonies in the British Isles and in the parts of Iceland where people from these areas are reported to have settled (see Gammeltoft 1998:226-7). It is hardly surprising that there are few signs of these people exerting any influence at the upper layers of society, since it was men of Scandinavian descent who controlled administration and public affairs in Iceland, whether they came directly from Norway or by way of a generation or two in the colonies in Britain. It was these heathen Scandinavians who directed the work and organized the farming, who decided how things would be done and how chattels and livestock were to be distributed. Slaves of Irish and Scottish origin were given Norse names and compelled to accept the language and customs of their masters. As a result, their culture never became a dominant force in Iceland (see Sigurðsson, G. 1988), even though the latest genetic research indicates that over half the female population of Iceland in the earliest period had had Gaelic foremothers and around a fifth of the men had been of Gaelic origin (Helgason A. et al. 2000, 2000a).

Although it is impossible now to assess the geographical distribution of different religions in the 9th and 10th centuries, the evidence of archaeology makes it clear that Norsemen in Shetland and Orkney had adopted Christianity long before the final years of the 10th century, the ‘official’ date given in the written sources for their Christianization through the offices of King Óláfr Tryggvason (Morris 1996). Also, the people who left the Breiðafjörður region in the west of Iceland with Erik the Red in 985 or 986 and settled in Greenland did not leave any signs of heathen burial customs in their new country. The oldest graves in the cemetery at Þjóðhildr’s church at Brattahlíð are all Christian and probably date from the last years of the 10th century (976 ± 41 years; see Arneborg et al. 1999:161), indicating that Christianity was the active faith of these people from the outset and in spite of what the sources say about Óláfr Tryggvason sending Leifr heppni to convert the Greenlanders around the year 1000.

According to Landnámabók, many of the settlers around Breiðafjörður originally came from the British Isles and are thus likely to have brought Christianity with them to their new home. It was the descendants of these people who were responsible for the settlement of Greenland (see the genealogical table on p. 262) and it is thus perfectly understandable that Christianity should have been well established in Greenland from the beginning of the Norse settlements there. A further pointer to the existence of links between the people who journeyed to Greenland and Vínland and the Christian cultural world of the British Isles is provided by a ringed pin of a design specifically associated with Viking Dublin, found at the Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland; no brooches of this type have been found in Norway, but they are common in the lands around the Irish Sea, in Denmark, and in Iceland (Fanning 1994:35; see also p. 271).

All in all, it is clear that the picture given in the sources of a land that was entirely heathen up until the adoption of Christianity at the Alþingi in the year 1000 is an oversimplification. There is clear evidence of Christianity among the original settlers, and good reason to believe that it survived intact in some form throughout the ‘pre-Christian’ period, at least in the west of Iceland. However, on closer examination a number of hints emerge from the sources that bring them more into line with what archaeology has to tell us about the religious background of Iceland in the earliest days of its history.

A further possible connection between Britain and the Norse journeys to America can be found in the central figure of Leifr Eiríksson (Leifr heppni, ‘Leif the Lucky’), who was himself, at least according to some, said to have been of good Christian stock. Icelandic sources give two accounts of the origins of his father, Eiríkr rauði (‘Erik the Red’). In the oldest source, Ari fróði’s Íslendingabók (‘Book of the Icelanders’), written some time in the years 1122-33, Eiríkr is said merely to have been ‘breiðfirzkr,’ i.e. from the Breiðafjörður region of western Iceland. However, younger sources—Landnámabók and the sagas that tell of Eiríkr’s life—say that he was originally from Jæren in western Norway and moved to Iceland with his father and lived initially at Drangar on Hornstrandir in the extreme northwest (see also Ólafur Halldórsson 1980). From there Eiríkr later moved south to the Dalir region at the head of Breiðafjörður and married a woman called Þjóðhildr. This Þjóðhildr was the daughter of Jǫrundr, son of Bjǫrg, who was the sister of Helgi magri (‘Helgi the Lean’) and the daughter of Eyvindr, who had been married to Rafarta, the daughter of Kjarval, king of the Irish. Thus, on his mother’s side, Leifr had Irish Christian blood in his veins, like so many other people in Dalir.

The written sources contain no record of where or when Leifr was born, but on the basis that his family moved to Greenland in 985 or 986 after Eiríkr rauði had spent three years exploring the new country it is assumed that Leifr was born in Iceland to have been old enough by the year 999-1000 to command a ship to the Hebrides (where he might have visited his relatives and where he acquired a son named Þorgils by a woman named Þórgunna, as related in Eiríks saga rauða), and then gone on to Norway and then back home to Greenland, touching in on Vínland on the way. It thus seems likely that Leifr was born where his parents lived first after they were married, i.e. at Eiríksstaðir in Haukadalur—if, of course, he is to be considered a historical figure at all.

Perhaps some confirmation of an element of historical truth in the sources has been provided by excavations led by the archaeologist Guðmundur Ólafsson (1998) at some ruins in Haukadalur known as Eiríksstaðir, which have uncovered a 50 square-meter (540 square-feet) hall that was occupied for a short period in the latter part of the 10th century. Two stages have been identified in the construction, but the hall was abandoned shortly after completion. It stood on the eastern boundary of the estate of Vatnshorn, on a limited space between two existing farms, so that whoever lived there stood every chance of landing up in disputes with his neighbors over land use and grazing rights. The information provided by the archaeologists, and the inferences that can reasonably be drawn from it, thus tie in excellently with the written sources of the life of Eiríkr rauði.

The world of the Icelandic sagas, in Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and mainland Europe, all the way south and east to Russia and Constantinople, was a world that was known to the writers of the sagas through the journeys of their contemporaries as well as from books—a world that people had living contact with up to the time when the sagas were written. The impulse to tell stories about and set them within this world may thus be related to the fact that this was a known world and a known setting. Things change when we move out past the limits of the world known to medieval man and find ourselves on the shores of North America in the Vínland sagas, Grœnlendinga saga, and Eiríks saga rauða. There were no books in 13th-century Iceland to provide writers with information about the lands to the south and west of Greenland, let alone first-hand contemporary accounts of journeys in those regions—though this has recently been mooted as an idea by Helgi Þorláksson (2001). Even so, people wrote sagas about voyages to these places in which the geography and inhabitants are described in some detail. So where did the saga writers get their information from?

As mentioned previously, many of the settlers around Breiðafjörður were of British descent, and so there would undoubtedly have been people in this region that would have been familiar with Irish tales of legendary, magical lands in the western ocean, lands of plenty where the tellers envisaged beautiful women, inexhaustible wine, rivers full of enormous salmon, and everlasting bliss. These highly fanciful tales have features reminiscent of the mythical Ódáinsvellir (‘Fields of the Undying’) described in Norse sources, in so far as those who managed to get to these wonderful lands had no way back to this earthly life. Tales preserved in Landnámabók and younger sources of a voyage by Ari Másson and other men from Breiðafjörður to a place called ‘Hvítramannaland’ (‘Land of the White Men’) may perhaps owe something to such legends and it is not improbable that stories of this type may have encouraged people to sail west in search of lands beyond the sea (see Pálsson, H. 2000, 2001). For instance, Landnámabók records that in the first party to move to Greenland with Eiríkr rauði there was a Christian man from the Hebrides, while according to Eiríks saga rauða Leifr heppni’s crew that landed in America included a man and woman from Scotland called Haki and Hekja (see Breeze 1998). Once people from Iceland and Greenland had reached the continent of North America, where the flora and climate bore distinct similarities to the descriptions in these legends, it is well conceivable that fact and fiction became merged in the telling, leading people to believe that they had reached the lands they had heard about in these accounts. However, the Irish legends are hardly on their own enough to explain the many realistic features of the Vínland sagas. However much these sagas may owe in their form to the literary genre of the travel sagas like Yngvars saga víðfǫrla (Andersson 2000), there is a vast difference between the descriptions of the lands to the west of the Atlantic and the stories of travels in the east where men capture cities and fight against kings. Such exotica in relation to faraway lands is entirely absent from the Vínland sagas—and it is tempting to see in this absence of exaggeration reality and hard fact and say that, if such wonders do not appear in the Vínland sagas, it is because such wonders did not appear in Vínland around the year 1000 either.

The Vínland sagas, Grœnlendinga saga, and Eiríks saga rauða, are in all probability the oldest writings to contain memories going back directly to people who witnessed the mainland of North America with their own eyes. They tell the story of a number of voyages from Iceland and Greenland around the year 1000, the earliest fully authenticated journeys across the Atlantic of which we know. These voyages led to the first encounters between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of North America. References in earlier sources also make it clear that the Vínland voyages were known of both in Iceland and mainland Europe before the two sagas were written early in the 13th century.

The Vínland sagas have been the subject of much learned study and research (see Bergersen 1997) and numerous theories have been advanced about the voyages based solely on the testimony of the sagas. The various and apparently incompatible views expressed on the source value of the sagas and the location of Vínland itself (see the table on p. 277) can, however, to a large extent be put down to the different scholarly methodologies employed and the changes in attitudes towards the origins of the sagas that have prevailed among scholars and interested amateurs over the years. If we take the trouble to understand the fundamental problems that lie behind the different findings and take into account the advances that, despite obstacles, have been made in Vínland studies in recent decades—in archaeology, in philological analysis of the saga texts, and in our improved understanding of how stories survive and change in oral preservation from generation to generation—then we will be in position to take up the search for Vínland again against the background of the ideas on oral tradition presented in the previous chapters.

The earliest written reference to Vínland occurs in Adam of Bremen’s Gesta hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (‘History of the Archbishops of Hamburg’), written around 1075. Adam cites information that he received in 1068 or 1069 from the Danish king Sveinn Úlfsson about an island in the west named Vínland where there were both grapes and self-propagating wheat. Were it not for the existence of the more circumstantial saga accounts from Iceland telling of this same Vínland, one would be tempted to suppose that Adam’s description was of the same stock as the stories from Ireland and elsewhere mentioned earlier concerning marvelous legendary islands far out in the western ocean. There is even a curious reference in Grœnlendinga saga that suggests how news of Vínland might have reached Bremen in Saxony: toward the end of the saga we read about a valuable item from Vínland called a húsasnotra (a term of uncertain meaning) made of mǫsurr (burlwood found in Vínland) which Þorfinnr karlsefni is said to have sold on a Norwegian quayside to a man from Bremen. Given the way that oral stories circulate, it is not hard to imagine, if there is anything in this story at all, that this húsasnotra might have been accompanied by some kind of narrative or other details of its origins and that this information may have then been passed on by the Bremen merchant when he displayed his exotic acquisition back in his home port (see Perkins 1989 on the connections between stories and memories and physical artifacts). We may also note that the hero of the short Icelandic tale Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka (‘Tale of Auðunn of the West Fjords’) is said to have traveled with a polar bear from Greenland to the court of King Sveinn in Denmark, which seems to confirm that to a medieval Icelander the idea of information and stories being transmitted between Greenland and Denmark did not present insuperable problems.

A much briefer reference to Vínland occurs in Ari fróði’s Íslendingabók, the oldest extant history of Iceland, compiled some time between 1122 and 1133. Ari tells us that in Greenland Erik the Red found evidence of ‘manna vistir’ (‘human habitation’), which indicated that the people who had lived there were of a similar kind to those who lived in Vínland and whom the Greenlanders called Skrælingar. Ari’s information on Greenland has every chance of being reliable since he cites an unimpeachable source, viz. his paternal uncle Þorkell Gellison, who had himself been to Greenland and met there a man who ‘fylgði Eiríki enum rauða út’ (‘went there with Erik the Red at the time of the settlement’). Moreover, the wording of Ari’s reference suggests that he assumed the existence of Vínland to be a generally known fact; indeed, one of the two bishops to whom he submitted his work for approval, Þorlákr Runólfsson, bishop of Skálholt (1085-1133), was himself the grandson of Snorri, the son of the Vínland voyagers Þorfinnr karlsefni and Guðríðr, and a man as likely as anyone to have known what there was to be known about the Vínland voyages. This all fits in well with an entry in the Icelandic annals for the year 1121, which records that Eiríkr upsi Gnúpsson, bishop of Greenland, set out to look for Vínland himself; nothing more was ever heard of him, but his journey in itself provides a further indication of a general awareness of Vínland and the earlier voyages across the Atlantic around the time that Ari was writing.

The Vínland sagas per se consist of two independent works: Eiríks saga rauða (‘Saga of Erik the Red’) and Grœnlendinga saga (‘Saga of the Greenlanders’). Eiríks saga is preserved in two Icelandic manuscripts, Hauksbók from the first half of the 14th century and Skálholtsbók from the first half of the 15th century, both based on an original written some time after 1263, which in turn was probably based on an older text from the first half of the 13th century (see Ólafur Halldórsson 1985:367-9). The saga in fact has little to say about Eiríkr himself and appears to have been written to elevate the memory of the first Europeans to have a child in North America, Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir from Laugarbrekka on Snæfellsnes in western Iceland and Þorfinnr karlsefni, whose son Snorri was born during their three-year expedition to Straumsfjörður, east and south of Leifr’s Vínland. Karlsefni was from one of the best families in Iceland, a descendant of Kjarval, king of the Irish, and of the great matriarch Auðr djúpúðga (‘Auðr the Deep-Minded’), who had been the wife of a viking king of Dublin before moving to Iceland and settling in the Dalir region. Guðríðr, on the other hand, was the granddaughter of a former Gaelic slave called Vífill brought to Iceland and freed by Auðr; this rather obscure background perhaps explains the somewhat frosty reception given to Guðríðr by her mother-in-law when Karlsefni returned home to Skagafjörður in the north of Iceland after his journey to Vínland. According to Eiríks saga rauða, King Óláfr Tryggvason of Norway entrusted Leifr Eiríksson, the son of Eiríkr rauði, with a mission to convert the Greenlanders to Christianity.

Grœnlendinga saga is preserved only in Flateyjarbók from around 1387 and forms part of one version of the compilation known as Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar hin mesta (‘Greatest Saga of Óláfr Tryggvason’). It therefore lacks its original beginning, this being replaced by a general introduction in the previous chapter about Eiríkr rauði and Greenland based on material from the Sturlubók redaction of Landnámabók. There is no doubt, however, that the saga was written much earlier, possibly at the very beginning of the 13th century, though there is little in the way of hard evidence to prove this (see Ólafur Halldórsson 1985:390-5, Ólason, V. 2001). The saga focuses on the role of Leifr Eiríksson. It describes his first voyage of exploration to Vínland in some detail and includes the tale, also found in Eiríks saga rauða, of how he got his nickname—Leifr heppni (‘Leif the Lucky’)—by rescuing some stranded sailors from a rock on his journey home (rescuing others is still considered a sign of luck among Icelandic seafarers). Grœnlendinga saga also includes further information on Guðríðr, the wife of Þorfinnr karlsefni, that in her later years she made a pilgrimage to Rome, as a result of which she later acquired the nickname ‘víðfǫrla’ (‘the Wide-Traveled’), before ending her days as a nun in Skagafjörður.

Both the Vínland sagas were written in the first half of the 13th century, independently of each other. They reflect a saga tradition among the descendants of Guðríðr and Þorfinnr karlsefni and both mention with pride that among their descendants were three bishops of the 12th and 13th centuries. In many respects their narratives tell the same story, but they also differ on a large number of points, making them particularly interesting for any discussion of the interconnections linking the sagas, oral tradition, and the external historical reality.

Eiríks saga rauða	Grœnlendinga saga
GUÐRÍÐR COMES TO GREENLAND Guðríðr comes to Greenland from Iceland with her father in a group of thirty people. Half of them fall ill and die on the way. A seeress tells Guðríðr’s future and she goes to Eiríkr rauði. Leifr accepts King Óláfr Tryggvason’s commission to promote Christianity in Greenland.
LEIFR FINDS NEW LANDS Leifr is blown off course and finds previously unknown lands to the west of Greenland where self-propagating wheat, grapevines, and mǫsurr trees grow. He rescues a group of people shipwrecked on a rock, converts them to Christianity, and is given the nickname ‘heppni’ (‘lucky’).	BJARNI FINDS NEW LANDS Bjarni Herjólfsson is blown off course and sees previously unknown forested lands to the west of Greenland.
	LEIFR EXPLORES NEW LANDS Leifr buys Bjarni’s ship and asks his father Eiríkr to come with him. Eiríkr says he is too old for such a journey but in the end agrees to go. On their way to ship, Eiríkr falls from his horse and returns home. Leifr discovers Helluland, Markland, and Vínland and on the way home rescues Þórir and his crew, fifteen all told, from a rock where they have been shipwrecked. They all fall ill during the winter and Þórir and some of the others die. Guðríðr is Þórir’s wife. Leifr gets the nickname ‘heppni’ (‘lucky’) from saving these people.
	ÞORVALDR GOES EXPLORING AND IS KILLED AT KROSSANES Leifr’s brother Þorvaldr explores lands to the west and east of Leifr’s camp at Leifsbúðir. He wrecks his ship on a headland, which from this becomes known as Kjalarnes (‘Keel Point’). Þorvaldr says he wishes to settle thereabouts, but then they see nine men under three skin-covered boats and kill them all except one, who escapes. They are attacked by a large force of natives. Þorvaldr is killed by an arrow and buried on Krossanes.
ÞORSTEINN ADRIFT IN THE ATLANTIC Eiríkr rauði’s son Þorsteinn buys Guðríðr’s father’s ship and persuades Eiríkr to come with him on the voyage. Eiríkr hides his gold before setting off, but on the way to ship he falls from his horse and refuses to go any further. The others lose their bearings and sail around lost for the whole summer.	ÞORSTEINN AND GUÐRÍÐR MARRY AND LOSE THEIR WAY IN THE ATLANTIC Þorsteinn Eiríksson marries Guðríðr, Þórir’s widow. They set sail for Vínland but lose their way and finish up in Lýsufjörður in Greenland. Þorsteinn dies but rises up from his deathbed and foretells Guðríðr’s future. His remains are moved to consecrated ground at Brattahlíð. Guðríðr also moves to Brattahlíð.
ÞORSTEINN AND GUÐRÍÐR MARRY Þorsteinn marries Guðríðr and they move to Lýsufjörður in the Western Settlement of Greenland. Þorsteinn falls ill and dies, but rises up from his deathbed and foretells Guðríðr’s future. His remains are moved to consecrated ground at Brattahlíð. Guðríðr’s father dies and she moves to Brattahlíð.
THE JOURNEY OF KARLSEFNI AND GUÐRÍÐR Þorfinnr karlsefni comes to Greenland and marries Guðríðr. There is much talk about voyages to Vínland, and Karlsefni and Guðríðr decide to go. With them go Eiríkr’s daughter Freydís, her husband Þorvarðr, and Eiríkr’s son Þorvaldr. They find Helluland, Markland, and Bjarney, as well as the keel of a ship on Kjalarnes.	THE JOURNEY OF KARLSEFNI AND GUÐRÍÐR Þorfinnr karlsefni comes to Greenland and marries Guðríðr. There is much talk about voyages to Vínland, and Karlsefni and Guðríðr decide to go. They intend to settle, so they take livestock with them.
THE STAY AT STRAUMSFJÖRÐUR They sail past Furðustrandir and stop at Straumsfjörður, where they find a beached whale. One ship intends to sail north around Kjalarnes in search of Vínland but is blown off course. Karlsefni continues south to Hóp, taking the livestock with him.	THE STAY AT LEIFSBÚÐIR They arrive at Leifsbúðir, where they find a beached whale that provides them with plenty to eat. They also live off the land, hunting, fishing, and collecting grapes.
ENCOUNTERS WITH NATIVES AT HÓP At Hóp they meet native Skrælingar. Karlsefni and his men trade with them, giving them red cloths in return for skins. Karlsefni forbids his men from trading their weapons. The Skrælingar are frightened away by a bull. But they return and attack Karlsefni and his men, who flee. Freydís, who is pregnant, puts the Skrælingar to flight by baring her breasts and beating on them with a sword. The Skrælingar find one of their number dead with an iron axe in his head. They take the axe and try it out on a tree, but it breaks on a stone and they throw it away. On the way home, Karlsefni kills five Skrælingar sleeping in their bags/boats made of hides. These Skrælingar feed on blood and bone marrow.	ENCOUNTERS WITH NATIVES After one winter they become aware of natives, who become frightened by Karlsefni’s bull. They trade with the natives, who offer furs and want weapons in return, but Karlsefni forbids this. Guðríðr gives birth to a son, Snorri, and sees a phantom. Karlsefni plans to use the bull to frighten off the natives. The natives attack and many are killed. One of them tries out an iron axe by striking one of his companions and killing him. Their leader picks up the axe and throws it into the sea. The following spring Karlsefni decides to return to Greenland, taking with him timber, berries, and skins.
ÞORVALDR IS KILLED IN THE LAND OF THE ONE-LEGGED Karlsefni sails north around Kjalarnes and comes to a river flowing eastwards. A one-legged man appears and shoots an arrow at Þorvaldr. He pulls it out and is impressed to see the fat hanging from it, a sign of prosperity in the new land. They realize they are looking at the same mountains as they had seen from Hóp, but from the other side. They estimate the distance from here to Straumsfjörður to be about the same as that from Straumsfjörður south to Hóp.
SNORRI AT STRAUMSFJÖRÐUR At Straumsfjörður there is a quarrel over women. Snorri, the son of Guðríðr and Karlsefni, is now three years old. They take hostages on their way home and lose yet another ship.
	FREYDÍS LEADS AN EXPEDITION TO VÍNLAND Freydís Eiríksdóttir leads an expedition to Vínland with her husband, Þorvarðr of Garðar. Egged on by Freydís, the members of the expedition fall out and start fighting at Leifsbúðir. She kills the women herself and the survivors return to Greenland. Leifr condemns Freydís’s behavior.
KARLSEFNI AND GUÐRÍÐR IN SKAGAFJÖRÐUR Karlsefni and Guðríðr move to Iceland and settle at Reynines in Skagafjörður. Karlsefni’s mother takes against Guðríðr, considering her to be too low-born to marry into their family, but eventually comes to accept her. Three bishops are named as being descended from Karlsefni and Guðríðr.	KARLSEFNI AND GUÐRÍÐR IN SKAGAFJÖRÐUR Karlsefni goes to Norway and sells his goods. He returns to Iceland and makes his home with Guðríðr and their son Snorri at Glaumbær in Skagafjörður. Three bishops are named as being descended from Karlsefni and Guðríðr.