Erik the Red

Entry #20 in project #EuropeanBios is Erik the Red. He was a serious bad-ass, the first European to set foot in North America, 500 years in advance of that asshole Columbus, and also apparently a really talented leader.

Erik the Red was born around 950, so his fellow Viking compatriots were still busy stealing Britain from Alfred The Barely Adequate, the subject of our previous thread, while Erik was still a teenager. Erik didn't take part because he and his family had been banished to Iceland.

The banishment was because Erik's father, Thorvald Asvaldsson, had killed some people -- it's not specified how many people or why. Iceland was already full of Vikings at this time, having been colonized earlier. It's a 1500-mile ocean voyage to Iceland, no biggie for Vikings.

(Unlike other stories of colonization, which generally involve theft and genocide, Iceland had no known human inhabitants when the Vikings arrived. The area of Greenland they settled was likewise unoccupied and there's no record of conflict. North America is a different story.)

Erik lived in Iceland until around 980 when there was a series of unfortunate events: one of Erik's servants triggered a landslide that crushed his neighbor's house. The neighbor killed the servant in retaliation, and in further retaliation Erik killed the neighbor. Vikings, man.

The neighbor incidentally was named Eyiolf the Foul, so probably not a stand-up guy. Nevertheless, Erik was banished to another part of Iceland, where 2 years later he got into another deadly brawl and killed two more guys, at which point he was banished from Iceland entirely.

People in Iceland knew that Greenland existed, and in fact due to atmospheric optical effects it's sometimes possible to see Greenland from Iceland, even though it's over the curve of the natural horizon. It was "only" 900 miles of ocean way, no problem for Viking navigation.

Erik somehow managed to persuade a bunch of people to come with him and establish a colony in Greenland. Unlike Iceland, which had been uninhabited until the Vikings got there, Greenland had indigenous people, but few enough that the Vikings never competed with them for anything.

Erik went to Greenland because he had to, but the people who came with him were probably looking for empty land to farm (Iceland was crowded and the rest of Europe even more so). There were also Walrus, whose tusks provided ivory, which was very in demand at the time.

Greenlanders also very profitably traded "unicorn horn", aka the tusks of narwhals, regarded at the time as having medicinal properties. The other attraction of moving to Greenland was that it was basically tax-free, since you were too far away to bother taxing.

These sources of trade and lack of taxes plus being in charge of everything made Erik the Red into a rich man, regarded with what seems to be respect and affection by his little kingdom, which at most reached about 5000 people, possibly only as high as 2500.

Because Greenland is, geographically speaking, part of the North American continent, this gives Erik claim to being the first European to set foot in North America. But in 970 he had his second kid, Leif Eriksson, who would have a much less wishy-washy claim to the same feat.

Leif went off to find the North American continent, and while he was gone there was a pandemic in Greenland that killed a lot of people including Erik himself. So when Leif got back he was ruler of Greenland, and far too busy to sail again. We'll pick up this story next thread.