Norse Greenland and Vinland, c. 985–1020

Late in the tenth century, Norse settlers led by Erik the Red established farming communities in Greenland after travelling west from Iceland. From Greenland, expeditions associated with Leif Erikson, Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir and Freydís Eiríksdóttir reached lands remembered in the Icelandic sagas as Vinland, Helluland and Markland.

The archaeological site at L’Anse aux Meadows confirms a Norse presence in Newfoundland around the year 1000, but the sagas combine remembered voyages with feud, legend and retrospective storytelling. Contact with Indigenous peoples involved trade, misunderstanding and violence, and the Norse did not establish a durable colony on the mainland.

William T. Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt retells this movement through saga, myth and speculative history. Freydís and Gudrid become opposing centres of a narrative that connects migration, environmental danger, rivalry and the first recorded encounter between Europeans and Indigenous North Americans.