Vinland, or the “land of wine,” isn’t listed on any modern map. A thousand years ago, however, it served as the stage for a monumental moment in world history. Icelandic sagas record it as the place where, 500 years before Columbus ever sailed a ship, the Vikings became the first Europeans to set foot on the so-called "New World," even building a short-lived settlement.
By the late 980s A.D., these Norse seafarers had already established colonies in Iceland and Greenland, the Atlantic stepping stones that brought them within range of the Canadian coast. From there, according to the oral reports of the time (written down two centuries later in the Saga of the Greelanders and the Saga of Erik the Red), the Vikings stumbled upon North America around A.D. 1000. Over the next couple decades they made several expeditions to this new-to-them world. They built homes, harvested resources, traded — and clashed — with the natives. Then, as quickly as they arrived, they abandoned Vinland.
The two accounts often differ. In the Saga of the Greenlanders, after the accidental sighting of unknown western lands, Leif Eriksson explores three distinct regions of Canada: Helluland, or “land of flat stones,” which was probably the barren Baffin Island; Markland, or “land of forests,” which was probably along the Labrador coast; and Vinland, a warm region in what is now the province of Newfoundland where Eriksson and a small crew wintered. In the Saga of Erik the Red, Eriksson is the accidental discoverer of Vinland, and an Icelandic merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefni is its explorer.
