Freydís Eiríksdóttir (born c. 965)[1] was an Icelandic woman said to be the daughter of Erik the Red (as in her patronym), who figured prominently in the Norse exploration of North America as an early colonist of Vinland, while her brother, Leif Erikson, is credited in early histories of the region with the first European contact.
Freydís' experiences in Vinland are relayed in Chapter 8 of this saga, which describes her as Leif Erikson's full sister.
When she returned to her husband, Freydís claimed that Helgi and Finnbogi had beaten her, and, calling him a coward, demanded that he exact revenge on her behalf, or else she would divorce him.
[citation needed] This saga portrays Freydís as a notable and strong woman, the half-sister to Leif Erikson.
The natives, equipped with "war-slings, or catapults",[3]: 29 stealthily attacked the expedition's camp at night and shot at the warriors.
[3]: 30 Freydís features as a main character in many modern novels including Ewald Gerhard Seeliger's Freydis Rothaar (1919), Elizabeth Boyer's Freydis and Gudrid (1976), William Vollmann's The Ice-Shirt (1990), Joan Clark's Eriksdottir: A Tale of Dreams and Luck (2002), Jackie French's They Came on Viking Ships (2005),[4] Amalia Carosella's Daughter of a Thousand Years (2017), Laurent Binet's Civilizations (2019), Max Davine's Spirits of the Ice Forest (2021),[5] Tamara Goranson's The Voyage of Freydis (2021), and numerous others.
[6] On television, Katia Winter portrayed Freydís in season 3 (2016–17) of the superhero TV series DC's Legends of Tomorrow episodes "Beebo the God of War" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Cuddly".
[7] A limited-mintage two-ounce silver coin was issued for the South Pacific island country of Niue and was announced in May 2021,[8] depicting Freydis storming ashore from a longship.