Anonymous · 1200 · sea

The Grœnlendinga saga and Eirik the Red's saga, written down in Iceland two centuries after the events and largely disbelieved until 1960, when a Norwegian couple found Norse houses at the northern tip of Newfoundland exactly where the sagas said a place called Vinland ought to be.

1. 1
   Jaeren

   Norway, and a killing that gets Thorvald Asvaldsson outlawed - so he takes his family west to Iceland, including a son called Erik who has inherited the temper.

2. 2
   Breidafjordur

   Western Iceland, and Erik the Red outlawed in his turn for two more killings - given three years to be elsewhere, and sailing west toward land a storm-blown sailor had reported and nobody had gone to look at.

3. 3
   Brattahlid

   Eiriksfjord, and a settlement founded on a coast Erik named Greenland because, the saga says drily, people would be more willing to go there if it had an attractive name.

4. 4
   Helluland

   Flat stone land, which is Baffin Island - the first of the three coasts Leif Eriksson names sailing south, and the one he describes as useless.

5. 5
   Markland

   Forest land, which is Labrador - and the thing Greenland most needed, since it had no timber at all and every plank had to be carried.

6. 6
   Leifsbudir

   Vinland, and the houses at L'Anse aux Meadows - a Norse site excavated in the 1960s with a smithy, a boat shed and a spindle whorl, five hundred years before Columbus and confirmed by carbon dating.

7. 7
   Hop

   Further south, the site the sagas describe with grapes and self-sown wheat and which nobody has found - somewhere in the Gulf of St Lawrence if it existed, and the reason Vinland was named for wine.

8. 8
   Brattahlid

   And home, and then not going back - three expeditions, some trade, a good deal of fighting with people the sagas call skraelings, and a colony abandoned because it was too far and too few.