Eirik the Red's Saga

Five hundred years before Columbus sailed, a murderer banished from Iceland discovered a land no European had ever seen. This is the story of Eirik the Red, whose exile became the foundation of the Norse settlement of Greenland, and of his son Leif Erikson, who sailed even farther west into waters that would remain unnamed on European maps for half a millennium. The saga unfolds through the feuds and migrations of Eirik's family: his wife Thjodhild, whose conversion to Christianity fractures the household, and his daughter-in-law Gudrid, one of the most compelling women in medieval literature, whose journeys take her from Iceland to Vinland and back again. But this is not merely an adventure tale. It is a document of first contact, depicting encounters with the Indigenous peoples the Norse called Skroelingar, and a meditation on what drives human beings to abandon everything familiar and sail toward the edge of the world. Written in the spare, brutal style of the Icelandic sagas, it offers psychological depth that feels startlingly modern, characters who scheme and love and fail, and a vision of fate that refuses to look away from human suffering. For readers who thought they knew the story of European discovery of America, this saga rewrites everything.