The Vinland Sagas

If the real life characters were even half as colorful as they are painted in these sagas, this is a good medium to tell their story. I felt more like I was reading a soap opera than a history book. Making them interesting also helps people remember them, which was needed before they were written down and were still oral.

The sagas in this book are particularly important because they demonstrate that the Vikings were in fact in America several centuries before Columbus. The saga that I enjoyed the most was Gr%u0153nlendinga saga. This saga tells us the story of the colonization of Greenland, and onto America. One of the interesting aspects of it is how it follows more than one person in the family, and not all are good people. I love all the twists in the story, and how each sibling found him or herself in the same place but act totally different.

This saga starts with Erik in Iceland with his father. They were forced to leave because of some killings. Erik goes on to get married and leaves because he himself got into trouble. He decides to go in search of land that a man who had gone off course once spoke of. In doing this he finds Greenland. Him and his wife settle here and have three sons and a daughter.

The story next brings in a new non-family character, Bjarni, because he gets lost on the way to Greenland and spots a different wooded land. He eventually finds his way to Greenland to tell about it. Leif, Erik's son, then becomes interested in this area and obtains a ship. He wants his father to lead the expedition but he gets hurt and sees it as a bad omen so Leif leads the voyage himself.

While in the new land, Leif and his crew discover grapes, and in the spring return to Greenland with a ship full of wood and grapes. On the way back they rescued a crew of 15, and he gained his name "Leif the Lucky".

Erik dies, but his other son Thorvald now wants to make a journey to the place his brother Leif had found. He voyages there, and spends two summers exploring before being killed by natives. This leads Torstein and his wife Gudrid to go to the new Vinland to retrieve his body. Shortly after he picks it up and returns to Greenland he dies, but tells his wife she will have a long profitable life. She then goes on to marry a wealthy man, Karlsefni, and she urges him to make a trip to Vinland. He stays in the camps originally setup by Leif and sets up trade with the natives. He does not allow his men to trade weapons but rather dairy. This does not last, as one of his men kills one of the natives, and they later return for war. They are able to fight them off but return to Greenland the next spring.

Next, Erik's daughter Freydis decides she wants a piece of the action and makes a deal with two men to go over and split profits. She instead plots and has the other crew killed. When they return to Greenland they tell a lie that the other crew chose to stay, but the truth eventually leaks out. Leif decides he does not have the heart to punish her as deserved but prophesies that her decedents will never prosper. This saga concludes with a brief rundown of Karlsefni's decedents.

The introduction to this book gives us some insight as to how they are viewed by historians. Obviously they are interesting and relevant or they would not be published today, but they are also hazy and full of inconsistency. While few argue the stories are based on truth it's hard to know exactly where the truth ends and the fiction begins.

These stories, as well as others, show that the Icelandic writers were fascinated with their little-brother country of Greenland. The continued study of them by several archeologists (both in the past and in modern times), and a hope to someday answer all the questions we still have, confirms that this fascination has not died out, and is still going strong today. From reading these interesting stories it is easy to see where this fascination comes from.