Saga of Erik the Red
[3] It also details the events that led to the banishment of Erik the Red to Greenland and the preaching of Christianity by his son Leif Erikson as well as his discovery of Vinland after his longship was blown off course.
Upon his death, she sailed to Orkney, where she married off Thorstein's daughter, Groa, and then to Iceland, where she had relatives and gave extensive land grants to those in her party.
The ship carrying his family and friends encounters bad weather and they reach Greenland only in autumn, after half have died of disease.
She asks for someone to sing varðlokkur (warding songs); Gudrid, although reluctant because she is Christian (her father has left while the heathen practice is going on), learned them from her foster mother and does so beautifully.
After his death, he himself reanimates and asks to speak to Gudrid; he tells her to end the Greenland Christian practise of burying people in unconsecrated ground and to bury him at the church, blames recent hauntings on the farm overseer, Gardi, whose body he says should be burned, and predicts a great future for her but warns her not to marry another Greenlander and asks her to give their money to the church.
They put in at a bay and have two fast-running Scottish thralls, gifts from King Olaf to Leif Erikson, scout the land and they bring back grapes and wheat.
Thorhall the Hunter, a pagan friend and servant of Erik's, then disappears and they find him after three days lying on a cliff-top, mumbling and pinching himself.
Soon a strange kind of whale washes up on-shore; the meat sickens them all, and then Thorhall claims credit for it as an answer to his making a poem for Thor, whom he calls his fulltrúi (patron deity).
They have a first encounter with natives they call Skrælings, who use boats covered in animal skins and wave sticks in the air that make a threshing sound; the Norsemen display a white shield as a sign of peace.
Having lost two of their number, they decide the place is not safe and sail back north to Straumfjord, on the way encountering five sleeping men with containers of deer marrow and blood, whom they kill on the assumption they are outlaws.
Karlsefni then takes one ship north in search of Thorhall, finding a desolate forested area where they lay up on the bank of a river that flows westward to the sea.
In Markland, they encounter five Skrælings; the three adults sink into the ground and escape, but they capture the two boys and baptize them; they learn from them that the Skrælings are cave-dwellers ruled by two kings named Avaldamon and Avaldidida, and that a nearby country is inhabited by people who go about in white, carrying poles with cloth attached, and shouting; the saga writer says that this was thought to be the legendary Hvítramannaland, and one version adds that that was also called Great Ireland.
The two versions of the Saga of Erik the Red, in the 14th-century Hauksbók (and 17th-century paper copies) and the 15th-century Skálholtsbók, appear to derive from a common original written in the 13th century[2][4] but vary considerably in details.
Haukr Erlendsson and his assistants are thought to have revised the text, making it less colloquial and more stylish, while the Skálholtsbók version appears to be a faithful but somewhat careless copy of the original.
It also has a very different account of the original discovery of Vinland; in the Saga of Eric the Red, Leif Erikson discovers it accidentally when he is blown off course on the way back to Greenland from Norway, while in the Saga of the Greenlanders, Bjarni Herjolfsson had accidentally sighted land to the west approximately fifteen years before Leif organized an exploratory voyage.
