Around 985 C.E., a Norse exile named Erik Thorvaldsson — better known as Erik the Red — returned to Iceland with stories of a vast, ice-ringed island to the west. He called it Greenland, and he wasn’t above a little salesmanship: a favorable name, he reasoned, would bring settlers. It worked. That summer, he led a fleet of 25 ships westward and planted the roots of what would become the longest-lasting European presence in the North Atlantic for centuries.
Key facts
- Erik the Red Greenland settlement: Erik founded two colonies on Greenland’s southwest coast in 985 C.E. — the Eastern Settlement near present-day Qaqortoq and the Western Settlement close to modern Nuuk — after three years of exile spent exploring the island.
- Norse colonization: Of the 25 ships that departed Iceland, only 14 arrived; the others turned back or were lost. Those who made it established a community that would eventually grow to around 5,000 inhabitants.
- Greenland exploration history: Erik was not the first European to reach Greenland — Gunnbjörn Ulfsson had sighted it accidentally roughly a century earlier, and Snæbjörn Galti had attempted an ill-fated settlement before Erik — but Erik’s colony was the first to endure.
A man shaped by exile
Erik Thorvaldsson was born around 950 C.E. in Rogaland, Norway. His father, Thorvald Asvaldsson, was banished from Norway for manslaughter and sailed west to Iceland with his family, including a ten-year-old Erik. Thorvald died not long after settling in the northwest of the island.
Erik married, built a farm, and tried to make a life in Iceland — but the same violent streak that had followed his father seemed to follow him. A feud over land damage caused by his thralls led to killings, counter-killings, and eventually a formal judgment at the Thorsnes Thing: three years of exile from Iceland. Rather than sulk, Erik sailed west toward a land he’d heard about but few had seen.
He spent those three years — beginning around 982 C.E. — exploring Greenland’s coastline systematically, rounding the southern tip and tracing the western shore until he found land that was, remarkably, ice-free in summer and capable of supporting livestock. He named inlets, wintered on islands, pushed as far north as Snaefell. When his exile ended, he returned to Iceland not as a defeated man but as a promoter with a pitch.
What the settlement actually built
The two colonies Erik established — the Eastern Settlement and the Western Settlement — were not outposts. They were functioning agricultural communities built around the same social structures the Norse had brought from Scandinavia and Iceland: farms, chieftains, a legal assembly, and eventually churches.
Erik himself built an estate called Brattahlíð near present-day Narsarsuaq and held the title of paramount chieftain of Greenland. The settlement grew into a society of roughly 5,000 people spread along Eriksfjord and neighboring fjords. During the warmer months, hunting parties traveled far north to Disko Bay, above the Arctic Circle, for walrus ivory, seal rope, and beached whales — commodities that connected Greenland to the wider Norse trading world.
The communities were not isolated. They maintained contact with Iceland and Europe, exporting luxury goods and importing timber and iron. Erik’s own son, Leif Erikson, would use Greenland as a launching point for the first known Norse landing in North America.
Lasting impact
The Greenland settlements endured for nearly 500 years — a remarkable run for any colony in such a demanding environment. They held on until sometime in the 15th century C.E., when a combination of factors including climate cooling during the Little Ice Age, shifting trade routes, and possible conflict with or pressure from Inuit populations led to their eventual abandonment.
But the significance of what Erik built reaches further than the timeline of the settlements themselves. Greenland became a bridge. It was the staging ground for Norse contact with North America, the first such contact recorded anywhere in the European written record. It established that sustained human life was possible in the sub-Arctic — a proof of concept that would inform centuries of later Arctic exploration.
Erik’s deliberate act of naming — choosing “Greenland” over something more forbidding — is also a small, durable lesson in how language shapes human ambition. The name outlasted the settlers by centuries and still names the island today.
Blindspots and limits
The Norse were not the first people in Greenland. Indigenous Arctic peoples — including the ancestors of the Inuit — had inhabited the island long before Erik’s ships arrived, and the Thule culture was expanding southward into Greenland during the period of Norse settlement. The sagas, written from a Norse perspective, give little attention to these encounters, and scholarship continues to work out the nature of Norse-Inuit contact — whether it involved trade, conflict, or both.
Erik’s settlement also rested on a system of thralldom: enslaved people whose labor was foundational to Norse society. The landslide caused by Erik’s thralls that triggered his first exile is one of the few moments in the saga where enslaved people appear at all — present in the margins of a history written entirely around the free.
The archaeological record fills in some gaps the sagas leave out, but much about daily life in the Greenland colonies — especially for women, thralls, and those without chieftain status — remains poorly documented.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Erik the Red — Wikipedia
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights secure 160 million hectares at COP30
- Ghana establishes a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on the Middle Ages
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