The Discoverers of the North Atlantic

Around 860, a ship bound from Norway for the Faroe Islands is driven west, far out to sea. At the end of its drift a strange land rises from the water, grey and high: it will be named Iceland. So begins the longest chain of discoveries of the Middle Ages, made almost always reluctantly, almost always by sailors who were looking for something else.

From the Iceland glimpsed by three storm-driven Vikings to the land of the vine that Leif the Lucky will reach, this account follows a century and a half of drift voyages, of named lands, and of first contacts. There is Ingolf, who settles Iceland; Erik the Red, banished, who invents Greenland and gives it the most beautiful misleading name in history; his sons, who reach America five centuries before Columbus; and Freydis, who plots a massacre in the snow.

At the heart of this epic of men searching for land walks a woman, Gudrid, to whom a seeress once promised an illustrious fate. She will bury husbands, give birth in America to the first European child born on the continent, then set out as a pilgrim all the way to Rome. Where the sailors cross the sea, she crosses time.

The journey follows fourteen stages, from the Iceland glimpsed by Naddodd around 860 to Karlsefni's attempt to settle Vinland around 1010-1013. Between the two, Ingolf founds Reykjavik, the chronicler Ari sets the memory of the settlement down in writing, Erik the Red discovers Greenland after a double banishment, and his sons, Bjarni, Leif, and Thorvald, reach in turn Helluland, Markland, and Vinland, lands the sagas name for what they offer: flat stones, forest, wild vine. The Skraelings, the native peoples encountered on these shores, mark the narrative first with peaceful exchanges, then with arrows.

Woven together from the Landnamabok, from the chronicler Ari's Islendingabok, and from the two Vinland Sagas, this book restores a world in which the chance of the winds decides discoveries as much as the courage of men. The divergences between the sources, embraced rather than smoothed away, speak the truth of a memory still uncertain about the death of Thorstein or of Thorvald, and give this account the flavour of a living testimony rather than a polished legend.

The first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, one that makes this account readable without betraying the original in any way. Twenty original illustrations and nine redrawn maps bring the itinerary to life, while a set of reference materials (glossary, timeline, index of places and people, further reading, editor's note, afterword) and selected passages from the original text accompany the reading.