Erik Red

Erik the Red (in Norrois Eirikr Raude ) (of 950 with 1003 or of 940 with 1010) Norwegian was . It was called Eirikr Thorvaldson, but its contemporaries called it “the Red” because it was russet-red.

Banished of Norway following a murder, it settled in the North-West of the Iceland, the first colonists are 450 people. Perhaps later, their number amounted to 3000, divided into two establishments located both at the bottom of fjords of the west coast (oddly called Etablissement of the West and Etablissement of the East). Erik remained pagan, but his Christian Thjódhildr wife, , quickly made build a church of which there remains traces. The colonists organized themselves politically on the Icelandic model, but the bishop of Gardhar rather quickly exerted an moral authority and policy until the tender of Greenland to the crown of Norway in 1261.

Victims of a cooling of the climate, fights with the natives inuits or of the famine, the Scandinavians disappear from Greenland towards the end of the 14th century.

See too

• Leif Erikson one of its sons, discoverer of Vinland;

• Vinland