Leif Erikson Day
By Ben Bryant, 3rd Year History
Celebrated annually on October 9th, Leif Erikson Day was established to honour the Icelandic explorer who, in the year 1000, led the first group of Europeans to land on the North American continent.
Since 1964, communities in the Upper Midwest where Nordic settlers originally arrived in the U.S., and locations in Canada and Scandinavia have observed the holiday. They commemorate ‘Leif the Lucky’ and his band of voyagers who discovered Vinland, five centuries before the voyages of John Cabot and Christopher Columbus.
Of course, the specific date of the landing is unknown, but the date of October 9th is still significant. On October 9th, 1825, the first coordinated Norwegian emigration to the United States arrived in New York aboard the Restauration. In 1925, during the Norse-American centenary celebrations, President Calvin Coolidge officially recognised Leif Erikson as the man who led the discovery of North America, encouraged by Norse-American scholars like Knut Gjerset.
Leif Erikson Day would not be formally recognised until 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed October 9th to be nationally observed by all following presidents. It has since become a celebration of Norse-descended and Icelandic-Americans and the soul of adventure and discovery.
Leif Erikson was born in Iceland and grew up in Greenland. His journey is relayed in The Saga of the Greenlanders, one of the two sources that document the Norse discovery and attempted colonisation of North America alongside The Saga of Erik the Red. The former saga first recounts the colonisation of Greenland by Erik the Red, before documenting six expeditions to North America, one of which is the voyage of Leif Erikson.
Erikson and his crew discovered three separate locations that they named Helluland, Markland and Vinland. These locations are all found on the eastern coast of Canada and are now commonly grouped under the name Vinland.
Helluland, or the ‘Land of Flat Rocks/Stones’, is now agreed among scholars to be Baffin Island. Markland is harder to pinpoint, but the location has been suggested as part of the Canadian Labrador coast, particularly Cape Porcupine. Finally, Vinland, the most famous of the three locations, is almost certainly within the region of Newfoundland and Labrador.
In 1960, archaeologists discovered L’Anse aux Meadows, since identified to be one of the only known Norse sites in North America, in the region that Erikson called Vinland. The unearthing of the settlement further proved the exploration of North America pre-Columbus and has since been thought to be one of the camps mentioned in the Icelandic sagas.
Leif Erikson has remained rooted in pop-cultural memory globally, appearing most prominently in Makoto Yukimura’s Vinland Saga as a mentor and father figure to Thorfinn Karlsefni, another explorer mentioned in the Icelandic sagas. Leif Erikson Day also stars in the most unlikely of places, an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, featuring as SpongeBob’s favourite holiday next to April Fool’s Day.
Today, Leif Erikson Day stands as a reminder of the spirit of adventure outside of the commonly recognised explorations of Cabot and Columbus. Crucially, it connects millennia-old ancestors to communities of their Nordic descendants within the North American continent.
Edited by Scarlett Bantin