Freydís Eiríksdóttir

Freydís Eiríksdóttir was a Norse woman associated in the Vinland sagas with voyages from Greenland to North America. The two principal saga accounts portray her very differently, making the details of her life uncertain.

One depicts her courage during a confrontation with Indigenous people, while the other accuses her of treachery and killings among the Norse settlers, leaving her historical identity difficult to reconstruct.

In William T. Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, Freydís Eiríksdóttir and Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir emerge as rival centres of the story, each carrying a different vision of what the new country might become. In Henry Treece’s Vinland the Good, Freydís Eiríksdóttir and the other settlers reveal competing responses to danger and opportunity, while contact with Indigenous inhabitants makes permanent colonisation increasingly precarious. The Vinland Sagas, translated by Leifur Eiriksson, presents Freydís Eiríksdóttir in the competing saga traditions of Norse exploration, settlement and conflict in Vinland, where her actions are remembered very differently in the surviving accounts.