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Leif was the son of Erik the Red and his wife Thjodhild (Old Norse: Þjóðhildur), and, through his paternal line, the grandson of Thorvald Ásvaldsson.When Erik the Red was young, his father was banished from Norway for manslaughter, and the family went into exile in Iceland (which, during the century preceding Leif's birth, had been colonized by Norsemen, mainly from Norway).
Using the routes, landmarks, currents, rocks, and winds that Bjarni had described to him, Leif sailed from Greenland westward across the Labrador Sea, with a crew of 35—sailing the same knarr Bjarni had used to make the voyage. He described Helluland as "level and wooded, with broad white beaches wherever they went and a gently sloping ...
Viking expansion was the historical movement which led Norse explorers, traders and warriors, the latter known in modern scholarship as Vikings, to sail most of the North Atlantic, reaching south as far as North Africa and east as far as Russia, and through the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople and the Middle East, acting as looters, traders, colonists and mercenaries.
Vinland was the name given to part of North America by the Icelandic Norseman Leif Eriksson, about 1000 AD. It was also spelled Winland, [4] as early as Adam of Bremen's Descriptio insularum Aquilonis ("Description of the Northern Islands", ch. 39, in the 4th part of Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum), written circa 1075.
Erik's son Leif Erikson became the first Norseman to explore the land of Vinland–part of North America, presumably near modern-day Newfoundland–and invited his father on the voyage. However, according to the sagas, Erik fell off his horse on the way to the ship and took this as a bad sign, leaving his son to continue without him. [ 10 ]
During his adventures, Leif names the three lands Helluland, Markland, and Vinland. Later, Thorvald, Leif's brother, sets sail to Vinland and lives there until he gets killed by the natives in a combat. Thorstein and Gudrid attempt to travel to Vinland but eventually fail, and thereafter Thorstein dies of an illness.
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 ...
Soon afterwards, Leif Erikson (Old Norse: Leifr Eiríksson), the son of Greenland leader Erik the Red, bought the ship that Bjarni had used for the voyage, hired a crew of 35 people, and set out to retrace Bjarni's journey.