A cousin of Naddod, Thorvald arrived with his equally lethal family: his son Eric had murdered someone in Norway and soon killed several more in Iceland. Some time late in the century, unwilling to return to Norway and outlawed in Iceland, Eric the Red (known either for his hair or for his homicidal incontinence) sailed westwards and landed in what, in an early example of branding, he called Greenland because ‘people would be much more tempted to go there if it had an attractive name’. Returning there with fourteen ships he built two settlements that were run by an assembly. His wife Thjodhild was a Christian whose piety ‘irritated him greatly’. She built a chapel (where a small cemetery contains bodies probably of the family), but punished him for his paganism by withholding sex, a serious punishment in such a remote place. But perhaps he converted, because they did produce four children.
Their houses were built with turf dung and stone with animals living closely for warmth, while household items were carved from reindeer antler, bone and wood. Greenland was not empty: Inuit tribesmen whom the Vikings called Skraellings lived there in sunken huts, hunting walruses and seals and even whales with harpoons, travelling by kayak. Eric and his family lived by hunting, and it is probable Viking hunters crossed Davis Strait into north America, settling at Kimmirut on Baffin Island (Canada), where whetstones and rat droppings been found. Since rats were not native to America, it is likely they accompanied the Vikings, who soon realized there was another land further west.
Eric’s son Leif the Lucky, a Christian, was encouraged by the king of Norway to convert the Greenland Vikings. Now he joined an expedition to America. Eric wanted to come too but, having fallen off his horse, had shown himself to be too old. Sailing down the coast of Canada, the voyagers (including one of Leif’s brothers, Thorvald) first stopped at Baffin Island, then sailed on to Newfoundland (Markland), where Nordic houses for around 100 have been found and dated to this moment – the arrival of the first Europeans to settle in America. The brothers then sailed on to found a second settlement, at L’Anse aux Meadows, where wooden objects had been carbon-dated by geoscientists to prove that the Vikings were there in 1021. It is unclear if this is the place they called Vinland, where they found vines growing. When they discovered three strangers sleeping under a boat, they encountered Skraellings – native Americans of the Boethuk and Mikmaq tribes – and killed two of them. The tribes hit back, shooting Thorvald with an arrow.
More Vikings arrived, including one, Porfinn, who fell in love with Thorvald’s widow Gudred. Their child together was the first European colonist born in America. Leif’s half-sister Freydis seems to have assumed power. Arguing with another group of settlers, she attacked them, ordering the men to be killed, but when her henchmen refused to kill the women, Freydis took an axe and butchered five women herself – ‘a monstrous deed’. She was forgiven when they were attacked by Skraellings: she rallied the defence by slapping her sword against her breast. L’Anse aux Meadows looks like a halfway point to somewhere else – but where?
Some historians have claimed that the Vikings made contact with other Skraellings. Far to the south, in Mexico, the Maya city at Chichen Itza, built around a pyramid 100 feet high, was now home to 40,000 – larger than London. In a 200-columned temple to war, paintings show prisoners with fair hair, light eyes and pale skin being killed. ‘The timing coincides perfectly with the Norse voyages,’ speculates Valerie Hansen; ‘ … the Vikings could have arrived in the Yucatán.’ If so, the adventure was disastrous – and left no other trace.
The Maya did not trade directly with north American peoples but there was indirect movement in goods and ideas: in the Mississippi Valley, the cultivation of maize and beans fuelled the building of small feuding towns, the largest of which was Cahokia in Illinois, whose population around 1050 seems to have expanded from 10,000 to 40,000, nourished by maize growing. A hundred mounds, still to be seen today, the remains of earthen pyramids that held ritual sweat lodges, charnel houses and temples, were centred around the original 100-foot mound and a giant plaza used for rituals. Cahokia was ruled by a family in which succession may have descended through the female line. Its elite played a game, chunkey, employing stones and linked to war and mythology. The losers were sometimes killed. Top men and women were buried together with beaded capes and shells, alongside hundreds of sacrificed victims, beheaded, dismembered or buried alive. Four mass graves contain fifty sacrificed young women.*
