Studies of farm waste show that relatively more beef, pork and goat were eaten when
Iceland was first settled, before mutton became progressively more dominant. Fish from
the sea played an important part in the diet, at the coast and inland alike, and salmon
and trout were commonly eaten in many parts of the country.
EIRÍKR THE RED AND THE ICELANDIC
SETTLEMENT OF GREENLANDGreenland was settled from Iceland towards the end of the tenth century. The settle-
ment was led by Eiríkr the Red whose background is explained in two different ways in
the sources. In the oldest source, Ari the Learned’s Book of the Icelanders, he is said to be
‘a man from Breiðafjo ̨rðr’, which is Ari’s customary way of describing people who are
born in Iceland. He identifies people from Norway differently. In later sources, the Book
of Settlement and sagas in which he appears, Eiríkr the Red is said to have hailed from
Jæren in Norway and gone to Iceland with his father. The two men were said to have
lived first at Drangar on Hornstrandir, after which Eiríkr moved to Dalir when he
married Þjóðhildr, daughter of Jo ̨rund and Þorbjo ̨rg knarrarbringa, who was by then
living with her second husband at Vatnshorn in Haukadalr according to the Book of
Settlement. Þjóðhildr’s paternal grandmother Bjo ̨rg was the sister of Helgi the Lean and
the daughter of Eyvindr, whose wife was Rafarta, daughter of King Kjarval of Ireland.
Thus Eiríkr and Þjóðhildr’s son, Leifr the Lucky, the first explorer of the Vinland area
west and south of Greenland, had Irish blood like so many other people in Dalir.
Archaeologist Guðmundur Ólafsson has excavated a 50 m^2 hall at Eiriksstaðir in
Haukadalr which was lived in for a short while at the end of the tenth century. Two
stages have been identified in its construction; the hall was abandoned shortly after it
was completed. It was fitted in at the eastern boundary of Vatnshorn between two
existing farms, and archaeological evidence about the history and location of the hall
corroborates what the sagas say about Eiríkr the Red.
Many people of Gaelic descent lived around Breiðafjörður and undoubtedly knew the
tales from Ireland about fantastic countries to the west, lands of plenty where the Irish
envisaged beautiful women, endless wine, rivers full of huge salmon, and eternal bliss.
These highly fanciful stories resemble Viking notions of Ódáinsvellir (the Plains of the
Undead) insofar as those who go to this paradise have no way of returning to their
earthly lives. Accounts in the Book of Settlement and later sources about Ari Másson
and other people from Breiðafjörður reaching the ‘Land of the White Men’ could be an
offshoot of these legends, and it is not improbable that such stories may have encouraged
people to sail and search for land to the west. When Eiríkr the Red went to settle in
Greenland, for example, a Christian from the Hebrides is mentioned as accompanying
him. After people from Iceland and Greenland had travelled all the way to the North
American mainland where the flora and climate resembled the descriptions in these
legends, it is not unlikely that fact and fiction merged, leading people to believe
they had actually reached the countries they were already familiar with from these
accounts.
The oldest relics left in Greenland by people of Icelandic origin are at the site
thought to be Brattahlíð, Eiríkr the Red and Þjóðhildr’s farm in the Eastern Settlement.
These are ruins of a little church in Viking Age style. Radiocarbon dating of skeletons
from the cemetery there indicates that they are from near the end of the tenth century
–– Gísli Sigurðsson––