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Vinland · 11 November 2026

The myth behind Vinland: Leif Erikson and the Saga of the Greenlanders

Vinland retells Leif Erikson's voyage west from Greenland, as told in the Saga of the Greenlanders, and the Norse site in Newfoundland that proves the sagas were not just stories.

HEIDR, the Norse seeress, with her carved staff by the fire

Vinland is HEIDR's sea song: a rowing beat, a lur horn, and a chorus about a land "where the wild grapes grow". Unlike most of her songs, this one is not about gods. It is about real people, a real voyage and a real place, and the main source is an Icelandic saga: Grœnlendinga saga, the Saga of the Greenlanders.

Two sagas, one voyage

The Norse voyages to North America are told in two sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red. They agree on the big picture and disagree on many details, from who saw the new lands first to how many settlers went. The song follows the Saga of the Greenlanders.

In that saga the first sighting is an accident. Bjarni Herjólfsson, sailing for Greenland around 985, is blown off course and sees unknown coasts to the west. (The Saga of Erik the Red does not mention Bjarni and gives the discovery to Leif.) Years later Leif, son of Erik the Red, decides to find those lands himself. He gathers a crew of thirty-five and sails west from Greenland.

Stone, forest, vine

The saga names three lands, and the song names all three:

  • Helluland, "land of flat stones": a barren, rocky coast. In the song: "Helluland stone under iron sky."
  • Markland, "land of forests": flat and wooded. In the song: "Markland forest, timber and pine."
  • Vínland, the land of wine, further south, where they decide to spend the winter and build large houses. The saga notes that day and night there were more even than in Greenland or Iceland.

The name comes from one of the best scenes in the sagas. One evening Tyrkir, a southerner who had spent many years with Leif and his father, goes missing. Leif is furious and takes twelve men to look for him. Tyrkir comes back in high spirits, talking in German that nobody understands, and finally explains in Norse: he has found vines and grapes. Leif names the country after them.

On the way home Leif finds shipwrecked sailors on a skerry, a group led by a man called Thórir, and takes them on board. Because of that rescue, the saga says, he was called Leif the Lucky from then on.

The proof in the ground

For centuries the Vinland sagas could be read as legend. That changed in 1960, when the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad identified the remains of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland. The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.

In 2021 a team led by Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee published a study in Nature that dated the site exactly. They used a spike of radiocarbon in tree rings caused by a solar storm in the year 993 as a marker, counted the rings outward in four wooden objects from the site, and arrived at the year 1021. It is the only secure calendar date for Europeans in the Americas before Columbus, almost five centuries before 1492.

One caution: L'Anse aux Meadows proves the Norse were there, but it is not necessarily Vinland itself. Historians still debate where the saga's Vinland really was.

That is the feeling the song's bridge is after: "Long before the others came / The sea remembered Leif's name."

Listen

Lyrics

[Intro]
Haf... haf...

[Verse 1]
Leif at the prow, the old world behind
Ice on the oars and salt in my mind
West past the edge where the maps run dry
Helluland stone under iron sky

[Pre-Chorus]
Row, row, the raven flies
Row, row, till the green lands rise

[Chorus]
Vinland, Vinland
Over the whale road
Vinland, Vinland
Where the wild grapes grow
We were the first ones
And no one will know
Vinland, Vinland
Over the whale road

[Verse 2]
Markland forest, timber and pine
A thousand years before their time
We built our halls by the river bend
But every voyage has an end

[Pre-Chorus]
Row, row, the raven flies
Row, row, till the green lands rise

[Chorus]
Vinland, Vinland
Over the whale road
Vinland, Vinland
Where the wild grapes grow
We were the first ones
And no one will know
Vinland, Vinland
Over the whale road

[Bridge]
Long before the others came
The sea remembered Leif's name

[Outro]
Haf... take me home.

HEIDR is a virtual artist: character, visuals and voice created with AI tools.

Sources