Overview

The life of famed Norse explorer Leif Ericson was celebrated in several Icelandic sagas. These lengthy stories generally tell of heroic adventure and the lives of chieftains. While some tales about Ericson’s adventures certainly existed in the 1000’s, the sagas about him were not written until between 1100 and 1300. The excerpts included in this feature paraphrase passages in The Flat Island Book, a collection of various sagas compiled by two Icelandic priests, perhaps in the late 1300's.