The country named "Vinland," or Wineland, began to be mentioned by European scholars almost 1000 years ago, and the name has echoed down the centuries. To mediaeval Europe, Vinland was a fabulous but vaguely known region of great forests and wild grapes, located somewhere in the western Atlantic. Today we know enough about this land to sketch its general location on a map. We can also reconstruct the historical events leading up to the discovery and naming of this country by Norse explorers from Iceland and Greenland.

From Norway to Greenland
The Norse adventure in the western Atlantic grew out of the Viking Age, a brief period during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. At this time, Scandinavian peoples suddenly exploded out of their northern European homelands. Isolated Viking raids along European coasts gradually developed into Norse armies that seized and occupied large areas of western Europe. In the east, Norse adventurers settled the river valleys of Russia, exploring and trading as far as Baghdad and Constantinople.

For some land-hungry Viking farmers, the most attractive land lay in the islands of the North Atlantic. Two such groups of islands, the Shetlands and Faeroes, were stepping-stones to the Norse discovery of Iceland. Between about AD 870 and 930, immigrants flocked to Iceland, which by the end of the period had an estimated population of 30 000 people.

Not much later, around AD 980, farming country was discovered along the fjords of Greenland, apparently by the outcast Eirik the Red. Immigrants arrived to build colonies on the southwestern coast of the new country, and soon the population of Greenland grew to an estimated 2000 people.

According to the early Icelandic stories known as sagas, the first sighting of North America was by a skipper named Bjarni Herjulfsson, who was on his first voyage from Iceland to visit his family in Greenland. Bjarni's discoveries were followed up a few years later, probably around AD 1000, by Leif Eirikson. He visited and named three countries, Helluland, Markland and Vinland.

Helluland was a rocky and barren land, probably Baffin Island and northern Labrador. Markland was a low forested coast, almost certainly today's southern Labrador. Vinland was a land of good grazing and timber, which Leif named after the grapes he found. He and his crew spent the winter there and then returned home to Greenland with a cargo of grapes and timber.

The first voyage was led by Leif's brother Thorvald. He spent at least two winters in the houses that Leif had built, and explored the neighbouring coasts. They were the first people to meet the indigenous peoples, with whom they fought, and Thorvald was killed by an arrow. The next year, another brother, Thorstein Eirikson, set out to recover Thorvald's body, but summer storms prevented him from sighting land.

The third expedition was the largest and was led by an Icelander named Thorfinn Karlsefni who intended to settle in Vinland. His son Snorri was the first European child born in the New World. During their three years in Vinland, Karlsefni's people explored further, and met and traded with the indigenous peoples for furs. Eventually, however, relations with the natives turned hostile. There were two battles and the Norse abandoned their colony and sailed home.

The final expedition, led by Eirik the Red's daughter Freydis and two Icelandic brothers, ended in feuding and murder during the first winter. With this expedition, the decade of Vinland exploration seems to have ended, and there are no further mentions of Vinland voyages in the saga accounts.