A very bad old picture of Leif Eriksson, posted here for your derision.



Today, as you’ve doubtless gathered from all the parades and celebrations in your neighborhood, is Leif Eriksson Day in the United States. Its date was chosen, not to commemorate the actual calendar date of Leif’s landing in Newfoundland (a friend tells me it seems to have happened in September on the basis of internal evidence in the saga), but in order to sneak in a couple days before Columbus Day and steal some of the Genoan’s thunder. Which the international Italian Conspiracy managed to thwart this year by arranging to have Columbus Day officially celebrated yesterday.

One aspect of Leif’s story which you used to hear about a lot, but much less nowadays, is his efforts as a missionary. According to Eirik’s Saga, one of the two classic saga accounts of the Vinland (America) voyages, Leif spent time at the court of King Olaf Trygvesson in Norway, where the king “bestowed great honor on him” (note what I said about such Icelandic visits to the court in yesterday’s post), and asked him “Are you intending to sail to Greenland this summer?”

“I think it would be a good idea,” said the king. “You are to go there with a mission from me, to preach Christianity in Greenland.” (The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, trans. by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, 1965, Penguin Books.)

This Leif did, to the great annoyance of his father Erik the Red, because Thjodhild, Erik’s wife and Leif’s mother, refused to cohabit with her husband after her conversion (this is questionable behavior under canon law, I believe, as it directly contradicts the teaching of St. Paul. I’m sure Father Ailill would have advised her otherwise). In the 19th and 20th centuries, when Christianity was more popular than it is now, many Leif enthusiasts looked on his voyage to Vinland as an extension of this mission, making him the first missionary to America. However, the sagas say nothing of that, nor of any attempt on his part to preach the gospel to the Skraelings (Indians).

In any case, scholars today are pretty sure the Olaf Trygvesson mission never happened. The story seems to have been introduced into the saga manuscripts fairly late. Early sources say that Olaf converted “five lands” to Christianity, but later writings credit him with “six lands.” The sixth land is Greenland, which the earlier writers hadn’t heard about, probably because it never happened.

I don’t think many historians seriously doubt that Leif was a Christian himself. The family gossip about religious conflict in his family has the ring of truth to it, and archaeologists have excavated a small church at his farm that matches the saga description of one Thjodhild built. But he wasn’t a government employee.

If you’ve read my Viking novels, you know that that was the Viking way.