“He named the country he had discovered Greenland, for he said that people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name.”

Eirik the Red was exiled from Iceland in the 10th century after skirmishes with neighbors and being declared an outlaw, and he founded the colony in Greenland. Bjarni Herjolfsson was blown off course on his way to Greenland in 985 or 986 and sighted unknown lands. Eirik’s son, Leif the Lucky, made an expedition to this new land and named it Vinland after the grapes that grew there. Later Leif’s brother-in-law, Thorfinn Karlsefni, created a settlement there, probably in the New England area of Canada. In the 1960s archaeological evidence of Norse settlement from about 1000 was found at L'anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, by Dr Helge Ingstad, former governor of Greenland, and his archaeologist wife, Ann Stine Ingstad.

The settlement in Greenland died out after about five hundred years due to increasingly cold weather in the 14th Century, the return of the Inuits to the south, and the annexing of Greenland and Iceland by Norway. This reduced Greenland’s independence and created a financial burden on a resource poor country. The Americas were rediscovered by Columbus in 1492. It is uncertain whether he knew of its location from the Vikings.

This was a short and engaging book which after an introduction explaining the background gives the translation of two Norse stories: the Grœnlendinga Saga written in about 1190, and Eirik’s Saga, written around 70 years later. The sagas focus on the personalities of the adventurers and their deeds, and also the qualities of the land explored. They were intended to be educational about history and geographical locations as well as providing entertainment. The sagas tell us of the Viking explorers, and we are also presented stories of the women, the remarkable Gudrid, and the scheming and vicious Freydis. I thoroughly enjoyed the Vinland Sagas and found them to be very accessible, simple and surprisingly readable.


The Viking Voyages ( )

My first sagas. I chose them because they are the two that mention Gudrid (the Far Traveler), and while I liked them a lot they didn't pull me in and hook me the way I hoped. The section at the beginning with a side-by-side comparison of The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red was especially helpful in seeing how these two tales overlapped and how certain elements could have gotten mixed up in the oral repetitions through the centuries. ( )

A couple of ho-hum sagas. Some guys sail to Greenland in the fog, end up in Nova Scotia. They love the place, overwinter there, return home and talk it up. Some interesting bits where they trade and then fight with the natives: refusing to trade weapons (the locals have no steel, only stone), they will only trade milk and red-dyed cloth. When the fighting comes the travellers are greatly outnumbered, but again the advantages of steel come into play as their boats and buildings are constrcuted from timber, and therefore provide decent protection against arrows. ( )

I liked these two short sagas.
It is fascinating to read stories that are this old and find that they are very readable. They are at times a bit short, I tend to think that details in this version/the original/the story that survived were left out, because the people that read them knew them already, living in the same area in the same time fame.
I liked it also, that there were quite a few descriptions of the characters in the saga, and what others thought of their actions.
All in all a nice getting to know this kind of stories. ( )

Let's start with the good aspects of this volume. Firstly, it is a quite convincing document of the discovery of America by the Icelandic Norsemen over a thousand years ago. This is not that well known an event, and is interesting for historical and cultural reasons. Secondly, there is a good introduction that sets the two sagas in their historical context and provides useful background information.
What lets this volume down however is the two sagas themselves, which describe roughly the same events but with some differences. Both of these have interesting points, and some good stories within them, yet the majority of each of these just isn't gripping storytelling and contains a lot of similar and dull genealogical details. When we think of the idea of a Norse Saga, we perhaps imagine blood-thirsty tales of adventures and exploration told around the fire and fueled by mead. To some degree this is what they were – and these do contain a bit of bloodshed and some heroics, but the manner of telling them does not carry a lot of excitement with it. It lacks the literary quality associated with other ancient texts of comparable feats. Fortunately however neither of the two sagas is that long, and so they can still be quite easily read despite their shortcomings.
This is a volume that I would recommend to those interested in this period of history and this topic, however this recommendation comes with the warning that the texts are not as interesting as might be expected. ( )