Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)

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Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner.
I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today we are braving the brisk waters of the North Atlantic and following in the wake of Leif Eriksson, the medieval Norseman who might have been the first European to visit America.

He probably was. And to help us, we have two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's a historian, writer and broadcaster based at Bathspa University, where she's senior lecturer in environmental history.

Her research focuses on the cultures, literatures and languages of the medieval north, particularly Viking history and the old Norse sagas.

She's the author of various books, including a new one, Embers of the Hand, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. It's Dr.
Eleanor Baraklaf. Welcome, Eleanor.
Thank you, Greg. Lovely to be here.

And in Comedy Corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian, and broadcaster.

As well as his fab stage performances in The Government Inspector, you'll also recognise him from hosting TV's The Great British Sewing Bee, or starring in the award-winning sitcoms, Ghosts, Stafflets, Flats, and Man Like Mobine, or delighting the nation on series 15 of Taskmaster.

It is the amazing Kyle Smith Bino. Welcome to the show, Kyle.
Hello. I feel like I've been slightly blindsided because I didn't know you were a doctor.

I'm not the useful sort of doctor. I can't.
If you have a heart attack, you're on your own. No, that's fine.
I know what to do.

You've not not been on the show before, Kyle. No, I haven't.
How do you feel about history? Something you enjoyed at school?

When I think of history in school, I remember the module where you have to build a castle. And mine was going so badly that I turned it into a dilapidated, ruined castle.
Nice.

And that wasn't what I started out to make.

But then I just went on clip art and made some pictures of fire and then printed it out and stuck it to the front.

What do you know about the man, the myth, the legend, Leif Erickson? I know that that's who we're talking about today. Great.

So, what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what our listeners will know about today's subjects.

And even if the name Leif Erickson is not familiar, you might have heard that a Viking was the first person to probably reach North America.

You might be sitting there thinking, what about Christopher Columbus? Well, we'll get to him.

But if you're listening from North America, hello, maybe you know that in the USA and Canada, the 9th of October is Laif Erickson Day.

He gets a day, which of course is celebrated in a much-loved episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, an important document.

He also pops up in Netflix's Vikings Valhalla, Laif Erickson, that is, not SpongeBob.

And the Norse presence in North America is referenced with a Viking character in the US remake of Your Sitcon Ghosts. Haven't seen it.
It's fine.

You are in the good one. That's brilliant.
The American one is fine. It's nice.
It's birthday. But you said he gets a day as in not his birthday, just another one.
Just a ceremonial day.

Yeah, October 9th. So Laif Erikson shows up in pop culture, there's novels, but how do we separate the truth and the lies from Leif's life?

Did Vikings really make it to North America, or is this just a big story? And how many people do you need to kill before you're kicked out of Norway? Let's find out.

When we talk about the Viking Age, what is it? How long is it?

Yeah, well, we can fix ourselves chronologically if we think of the Viking Age as spanning at least from around 750 CE, roughly, up to about 1100 CE. And it begins in the Scandinavian homelands.

So we're thinking Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It involves violence.
Hang on, why is Finn not in there? Oh, because actually that's not a Scandinavian country. Nordic, they're there, but not

quite in the same way. But yeah, there's lots of violence, there's conquest, but there's also trading and exploration and settlement.

So you end up with this Norse diaspora that encompasses parts of the British Isles and Western Europe, Mediterranean, what's now Russia and Ukraine, and then all the way to Constantinople, they end up in Baghdad.

Then in the other direction, they go all the way across the North Atlantic and they settle the Pharaohs, Iceland, Greenland. Do you know what we call them Vikings, Kyle? No.
Fair enough.

Thank you.

Eleanor. Okay.
There's no place called Vikingland.

No, no, there is a place called Vik in Norway, which is sort of might be related to the word, but there's an old Norse, so that's the language that the Vikings spoke, there's an Old Norse version of the word, Vikinger, which is someone who's essentially a raider.

So it's basically a seaborne raider, but not everyone who lived during the Viking Age in that cultural context is a raider, so they're not all Vikings. And even raiders are not always raiding.

And sometimes, sometimes they call their children Vikings. What's a raider doing if he's not raiding? Farming, mostly.

Farming. Yeah, fishing.
Farming raiders. Yeah, mostly farming.
You've got to eat before you can go and steal all that. I'd bully that guy.

So most Vikings aren't Vikings. Most Vikings aren't Vikings.

Yeah, and that idea in the 19th century gets expanded. And Viking becomes a sort of catch-all term for that early medieval Nordic diaspora.

Let's talk about Leif Erikson himself, the star of today's episode. Who's Leif Eriksen? You know, when's he born? And that's it.

So, okay, so Leif, he's probably born in, I don't know, something like 975, 980 in Iceland. He's a character mostly in two of these sagas.

One's called Greinlandinger Saga, which means the saga of the Greenlanders, and the other one is Eriksaga Roede, which is the saga of Eric the Red.

Now, together they're known as the Vinland sagas because Vinland is the Old Norse word for that part of North America, the edge of the continent, that the Norse, spoiler alert, do reach around the year 1000 or so.

And Leif seems to be a very big part of that.

I can't believe you've spoiled that for me.

But Leif, his dad is called Eric the Red. But he's Leif Erikson because of that.
The sagas like him.

He's described as promising, tall, handsome, moderate in his behaviour, in stark contrast to his father. Oh, okay.
All right. So, can we trust the sources?

Can we say they're historical documents with real people in them? Yes. The historian's answer is, depending on your definition of historical

good historian's answer. There you go, just covering all the basics.
But how do you decide what's real and what's

because if there's so much of it mixed together, how do you decide what's real and what's not? Just on what you

like. Yeah, this is, yeah, I mean, you're looking for other evidence.

So, for example, the Vineland sagas, these two sagas featuring Leif, they were actually the basis for archaeologists in the 60s realising that actually the Norse had reached the edge of the North American continent, and then they find the archaeological evidence.

And sometimes you've got to think of them in a different sense. So it's not just a case of, okay, let's sift out the history from the fiction.

We've got to think of them as essentially a kind of cultural storytelling, remnants of how this particular culture thought about the world and their place within it.

And in fact, the word saga comes from an old Norse verb adseja, to say, to tell. So we've heard that Eric is the father of Leif Eric's.

So he's born in Norway and then he's forced to leave Norway because of some killings, how they put it in the star.

Okay.

How many killings are some killings, Eleanor?

More than one. I can't remember.

It's not good. Yeah.

so he's outlawed and he goes off to Iceland, settles there, and he he marries Tiodhilde, his wife, and they have a family, but then it's not long before he's in trouble again.

And this is such an embarrassing story.

Basically, he gets into an argument with his neighbour about some benchboards, which are kind of carved decorative panels, and everything goes downhill very fast.

And once again, he finds himself outlawed, this time from Iceland because of some killings. So Eric the Red was exiled twice, second time for an argument about some bench boards.

You seem like a very chill guy, Kyle, but have you ever gotten to a beef with a neighbour over a lawnmower or something? No, can't have it in the first place. Get off, here you are.

No, I don't think so. My neighbours recently painted their fence and some of it's bled through.
Oh, and it looks horrible on my side. So, what are you going to do? Some killings.

How do we know North America is settled by Vikings? Or at least what do the sagas say? So, the saga. So, we're back with those two Vinland sagas.
Yeah.

The saga of the Greenlanders, the saga of the red. They give slightly different accounts.

According to the saga of the Greenlanders, the first person to sight land to the west of Greenland is a merchant called Bjadni. He gets blown off course.

Often discoveries happen because people have just got lost at sea. But he doesn't explore it, and the sagas are not very pleased about this.

Basically, everyone criticises him because he's shown a lack of curiosity, which is sort of not a Viking thing to do. And then later, Leif goes back and finds the land.

When you say not very pleased, is that

they kill him?

No.

No, he's fine. He doesn't.
But it's just like, oh, okay,

you didn't set foot on there. All right.
All right, interesting. Passive-aggressive, right? Yeah, yeah.
So the stages are extremely passive-aggressive. Yeah.

They'll just say she slightly changed colour, and that means she's absolutely furious. Wow.
Yeah.

I used to work for a lady who ran a children's entertainment company. And every time she hated something, she'd go, that's interesting.

There you go. Okay, so 1000, Laith Erickson has found, or at least explored, a new land.
Yes. So what does he find?

Well, I should say, not just he, but his followers and the main discoveries, once again, in both sagas, are made by enslaved people. So it's very important.

So one is called Tirkir, and the others are two sort of Scottish slaves called Hakki and Hekia. And they basically find, so, well, before they get to Vinland, they find other lands.

And then they come to this region, which they call Vineland because of the sort of the wild grapes. The weather is fine.
The winters are mild. There's salmon.
There's all sorts of nice things.

And they think, great, this works. And so they build some temporary houses there.
Oh, lovely, yeah. Yeah.
And they call them Leifs Boothir, which means kind of like Leif's booths, Leif's houses.

So we've heard about people getting blown off course. We've heard about shipwrecks.
Kayell, in Taskmaster, you built a beautiful egg boat. Yes, I did, didn't I? You were a master shipbuilder.
Yeah.

So could you talk me through how to build a Viking longship?

Well, what you want to do

is get some of your neighbour's decorative

bench boards. Bench boards.
You want to turn them the other way around so your neighbor can't tell that you

used his.

And then knock it together.

Get some mead for the journey. Maybe a pig.

Right? Because you don't know how long you're going to be at sea. Sure.
How are you propelling this boat? What's the propulsion mechanism? Pig?

More boards. More boards.
Yeah, so we use the boards like oars. Okay, you're using oars.
Yeah, because I imagine the water's quite cold.

Yeah, so I'm not popping my hand in there. No.

Right, so. But

we can also use some of that to cool the mead.

Cool the mead wife. So yeah, cool the mead wife.

That's my plan. Tell me about Viking shipbuilding, because they are renowned.
Oh, yeah, they are amazing. Oh, you mean it wasn't exactly what I said? Well, like raft with a ping.

Well, for a start, they're propelled by sails as well as by oars. And that is very important because when you're in the middle of the North Atlantic, you might need the odd sail.

And rather than your raft, you've got to try sort of clinker-built style. So you've got boards, you've got planks, and then you're overlapping them.

So they make these very supple, beautiful boats with very shallow bottoms, which means means if you want to go raiding, you can sail them into very shallow bays.

And then if you want to go across the North Atlantic, you're going to need something a bit bigger. And those are boats that then you can fit your family in, your followers, your livestock.

You can try pigs, but I'd go for goats and sheep. So these are two different types of.

Yeah, there's multiple different types of boats, but it's still pretty cold. Yeah, there's no cabins, there's no lower deck.
No. Just benches.
Yeah. And so it's open sky.

So if it's raining if it's snow exactly yeah you're there with your furs yeah you're there with you and if the furs are probably wet i mean there's also you know a lot of sun too much sun and not enough wind also not great and you can end up just stuck there in the middle let's get back to leif erickson so we have the two sagas the vinland sagas they don't say very much about him after the journey we know about his family though yes leif's he's got siblings yeah he's got siblings half siblings something yeah we're not quite sure but yeah exactly and they

even after Leif comes back to Greenland, then, according to the sagas, seem to be making voyages out again to Vinland, as they call it. So there's one led by Leif's brother, Thorvald.

Doesn't end well for him. Another by.

By his name, though. Yeah, it's a lovely name, isn't it? Yeah, so Thorvald, and then he's got another one, Thorstein.

And

Spain, I'm not into it.

No, not. But Thor is like Thorstone.
So like the god, yeah. Thorstein, yeah, the goddamn

curve. Yeah.
I preferred the first one. Okay, we'll stick, Yeah.

And then there's ones led by what was his sister-in-law, Guthrider, with her new husband, Carl Stephanie.

And then there's another one either led by, or at least she is there, depending on the version, by his sister, half-sister, Freydis.

And she's. How am I going to put this delicately?

Terrifying? Should you read it?

Oh, yeah. I mean, Reid

doesn't even come close to her.

Okay, but here we're talking very specifically about the saga of the Greenlanders, because this is one of these really interesting things where we've got oral traditions that

end up in these sagas, but her character, it depends on which saga we're looking at. Saga of Greenlanders, yeah, absolutely terrifying.

She makes a deal with two Norwegian brothers to sail to Vinland, and they're there to gather timber and resources.

But she ends up getting her followers, and specifically her husband, to kill all the men on the other boats. And no one will kill them.

So she gets into an argument with them, and she wants the bigger of Leif Spoothir, and she wants kind of all the resources. And she's just not nice.
She knows what she likes.

She does. The problem is...
She's

it gets, yeah. She also, so no one, there were women in the other party as well, on the other ship, and no one will kill them.

And so she actually, she says, hand me an axe, or literally put an axe in my hand.

She finishes them off. And it just says in the saga, and so it was done.
It's horrible. Radis, in one saga, is a sort of psychopathic, tarantula character.
Horrible, yeah.

Then the other saga, she's not nearly as terrified. No, she's still quite hardcore.
She's hardcore, she's totally badass, she's amazing. She's a raidette, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So she doesn't lead the expedition in this one, but she's on the expedition, and then there's a violent encounter. She's sad from Slash and those reliance to it.

She's exhausted. Oh, yeah, but well, so they get into

an altercation with the local population that they meet there,

and so basically all the men run away and there's a weapon on the floor from one of the people who's been killed and she picks it up to face the sort of indigenous people who are coming towards them and by the way she is heavily pregnant at this point and she bares her breast and she slaps the sword against it and we're not entirely sure why but basically the indigenous people are so terrified they then run away and that would scare me out oh yeah yeah yeah we've touched on a really important point you You said, you know, the locals.

So when we talk about the discovery of new lands, obviously they're not new lands. People have been living there for 25,000 years.

Indigenous peoples in North America, in Canada, the First Nations peoples. So what do the sagas say about these interactions between the Norse and the

native people

of Newfoundland? Is it Newfoundland? Newfoundland. Yeah, well, and further south.
Yeah, exactly.

And this is really interesting because it's possible this is the first time, if we think of the world as a circle, this is the first time you see the two sides culturally meeting.

These are the first encounters we've got. And it's sort of pretty typical.
So depending on the saga, depending on the episode, sometimes they're trading.

And they particularly, so the indigenous people particularly like the red cloth and the dairy products and the weapons, but the Norse are like, nah, we'll keep hold of the weapons, thank you. But then

the Norse give them furs and skins. So it's actually very much like what happens later on when you enter.

Not necessarily, because in other encounters, they basically all go horribly wrong, and there's a lot of violence, and people get killed, sometimes entirely without provocation.

One episode, it's like they just found three people sleeping, so they killed them. And there's not an asleep.
Yeah, it's not, it's not great. It's really not.
And it's telling. They describe them.

The word they use is skreilingar. And skreiling means sort of wretched or puny.
So that's how the Norse are looking at these people.

And they lump them all together, but we're probably talking about, you know, the Innu of Labrador and the Beotuk of Newfoundland. And then we've got around the Gulf of St.

Lawrence, which is probably that sort of southern extremity of where they get to, we've got the Algonquins and the Iroquois. So we've got those various groups that the Norse do seem to encounter.

But ultimately, when they leave for the last time in the sagas, they say, We've found a land of fine resources, but we won't be able to settle here. We won't be able to use it.

So that's the story told by the sagas these two sagas the the vinland collection which is yeah eric the red saga and the greenland saga yes yeah do we have any more evidence for the life of leif basically those sagas from what we know of the sagas he's got to have died somewhere between 1018 and 1025 and that's purely because in one of them he's there in greenland and in the next it's his son and there's no sign of him so he's probably gone definitely dead by 1025.

yeah it looks like it's a thousand years ago a good nice memorable number there we go let's stick with that one yeah So we've killed off Laif Erickson, right?

We don't know how he dies, but he dies in 1025. We think it will take.
Ish. Ish.
Probably of, I don't know, old age or whatever. Although, you know, maybe he was killed.

Sorry, I've got to put this in my calendar. We can't say ish.

I need a date. Okay.

By 1025, someone else is in charge of him. So he's definitely dead by then.
Okay. So

let's agree. 1025.

Can't be that. Yeah.
We're not in the right period of history to be really nice. Okay.

Let's talk about the afterlife of Laif. The after Laif.
Yeah, the afterlife. That's so good.
Thank you.

What happens to his story? You know, he's dead, but what happens

in the modern day? Well, so this is quite interesting because the first English-speaking settlers of the US and Canada want to emphasise their English roots.

And we know that Columbus landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola takes hold as sort of an alternative origin myth for the US after the War of Independence, particularly.

But Columbus also has never actually set foot in North America.

So then the story of Leif Erickson gets really popular in the 19th century. And part of that is because Protestant US citizens, they're not, you know, Columbus is a little bit too Catholic for them.

So

what seems to be happening is Viking gets conflated with the idea of Anglo-Saxons. It implies a sort of ancestral link to modern white Americans.

So it's this sort of quite uncomfortable racial myth of white Anglo-Saxon colonizers bringing civilization to indigenous populations around the globe. You know, it's the classic story.

So, Eleanor, you are an environmental historian. You work with archaeologists? Yes.
Collaboratively? Yes. Okay.
What kind of science have we got that actually goes, yeah, you know what?

The Vikings did get from North America. We do have that.
And so, and basically, the Winland sagas directed these archaeologists straight to it.

So, in the 1960s, archaeologists started working on a site in Lanser Meadows in Newfoundland, in Canada, and they found the remains of several Norse-style Norse-style buildings.

So, it looks like there's some that people can live in temporarily. It looks like there's workshops where people can sort of own things.
It's the tip of Newfoundland.

Yeah, so it's a place called Lance O'Meadows. Yeah, it's right by the water.
This is temporary.

So, you can tell no one's really living there permanently because, yeah, essentially, you'd expect to see more rubbish, you'd expect to see some graves, all the rest of it. You don't have that.

So, it looks like what they're doing is essentially using it as a stopping off point, mending their ships, overwintering, and then they can go further south.

And there's some things that have been found at that site, like butternuts that don't, and butternut wood, they don't grow that far north.

So we're talking the area further south down the Gulf of Serin. Brought stuff there and left it.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So Vinland, in a way, isn't that place.

Vinland is the whole area going south from there. Okay.
And

the exciting scientific term I'm going to use, radiocarbon data. Oh, yeah.
Do you know what that is, Kayal? Not a clue. No.

Solar flares.

That's a bit of a problem. That's not helping.
No.

So, this is something that's just been found, which is they know that there was a big cosmic storm, so like big solar flares, in the year 993.

And you can see that in some of the wood that has been obviously been chopped by the North at this site at Lanser Meadows.

So the way we can know this is we know the date of the solar flare, which is 993, and then we just literally count forward on the tree rings.

Every ring is a year, and when we get to the end of the rings, that tells us the year that the tree was cut down. Dendrochronology.
Dendrochronology, exactly. Thank you.
And so.

So it's how many rings since the flare? Yeah, exactly. And so we know that that wood was cut in the year 1021.

And so that's the one date that we can say, all right, it looks like the Norse were definitely at this site in this year, which is really specific because usually we're talking, you know, a good flabby hundred years or so.

Yeah, yeah. So that's during Leif's life because he died in 1025-ish.

Probably his sister might be there. This could be Freydis.

Or it could be the axe she used. It could be the murderer, the murder weapon.
Who knows? Wow. So this site is called Lance O'Meadows.
It's very exciting. It's very important.

There's other stuff too, other physical evidence. There's an archaeological site that's not Norse, it's early Inuit.

And it's close to the sort of southernmost tip of Baffin Island. And there they found this really lovely piece of carved wood.
And it's a human figure and it's about five and a half centimeters high.

But it looks like it's wearing Norse clothing, so it's got like this very full-yes, it's lovely, it's like this full folds of a skirt, and then possibly a yoked hood covering the head and the shoulders.

And we have Norse graveyards in Greenland, yes. So, we've got a Norse grave, like, and I can't remember if it's stuck in their ribs or something, but it's an arrowhead.
This is not a Norse arrowhead.

The only thing they found that is sort of equivalent to that is over in

you know, in the cultures of people who were living on that edge of the North American continent. And actually, that's how one of Leif's brothers is said to be killed in the saga.

So an arrow basically hits him. So it could be him.
It could be him. Let's say it's him.
We've got greatest

passing that word. Now we've got Leif's brother.
I'm starting to realize. It's let's say, let's say this.
Let's say, why not?

That's what history is. You heard it here first, Kayell.
The nuance window!

This is the part of the show where Kayell and I pull the ship to shore, we get warm by the fire, and Dr. Eleanor teaches us something we need to know about Leif Erikson and the Viking Age.

Take it away, Dr. Eleanor.
Okay, so what I would say is that big names such as Leif the Lucky and Eric the Red are the ones we tend to know about.

But I want to make the case for the everyday people who are just bumping along, living their lives through the Viking Age, because they're every bit as interesting, if not more so, than the larger-than-life characters who end up in the sagas and history books.

We We just don't get to hear about them so often, although, oh, a book coming out in September called Embers of the Hands, which may be very much about that subject.

So it's this idea of looking at the everyday people who slip between the cracks of history and the little bits and pieces of them that survive.

And Greenland is actually a really exciting example of this.

It's my favourite part of the Norse world because its remoteness and that permafrost we talked about means that tons of material from Norse Greenland has actually been frozen in time.

And I'll give you two examples, but they give us more names, names of ordinary humans that we wouldn't know about otherwise. Now, one of those comes from a coffin in a graveyard.

There's no body in that coffin, but there's a rune stick.

And carved onto this little piece of wood is an inscription that can be translated as, This woman who was called Gudveg was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea.

So, earlier when we were talking about those great voyages across the ocean, we have to remember how many ordinary people and how many women were there, and

how many of them may have actually not reached the other side. The other example, again, runes, this time on a stone found high in the Arctic, hidden in a cairn.

And these runes refer to three men, Erling Sigvatsson, Bjadnir Thoderson, and Einderi the Oddson. And it says they built these cairns the Saturday before Regation Day, which is in late April.

They were probably hunters. Perhaps they were up there looking for walrus because of that really, really precious ivory.
But if they're there that early in the year, they probably got stranded.

Maybe they overwintered there. We never know if they got home.
But we don't know what happened to them.

And so that's what I'd say that is the stories of everyday people that we really need to remember. Oh, lovely.
Thank you so much, Eleanor. That's fascinating.
Should I go to Greenland? Yes.

Well, what do you mean, yes? I was going to say, depending on which bit of Greenland, what time of year you want to go and what you want to get up to while you're there.

And how hot does the summer get? It can actually, well, particularly now, you know, it can get quite hot. I've been there when it's, what, I want to say 25 degrees, kind of t-shirt weather.

Not enough for me. Not enough.
So if you're looking for tropical, nah, not Greenlands. No.
But they did get, I mean, you can go to Istanbul, you can go to all sorts of

nice places. Yeah, Vikings got there too.
Okay, well, listen out if you want more Viking Age adventures, check out our episode on Old Norse Literature.

For more early American history, why not listen to our episode on Sakajoea, who's a very fascinating lady.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with friends, subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the excellent Dr.
Eleanor Barriclough from Baths Bar University. Thank you, Eleanor.
Thank you.

This has been so much fun. It has been fun.
Thank you for teaching me. Thank you, Eleanor.
And in Comedy Corner, we have the master student himself, the brilliant Kyle Smith Bino. Thank you.
Ra!

Good Viking energy. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we sail off on more historical adventures.
But for now, I'm off to go and fight my neighbor over who gets to keep my lawnmower.

Hooray! Bye!

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