"Magnus, by the Grace of God, King of Norway, Sweden and Skaane, send to all men who see or hear this letter, good health and happiness." So read the royal decree that sent Paul Knutson and a band of forty hardy Norsemen 3,000 miles across the uncharted Atlantic. Elizabeth Coatsworth has used the historical enigmas of the Kensington Stone, a lost Greenland colony, and a light-skinned, blue-eyed Indian tribe to weave this gripping epic for the LAND OF THE FREE Series.

To win Greenland's Western Settlement back to Christianity was the avowed purpose of this odyssey. For word came to Magnus Erickson's court that the colonists had reverted to paganism. But fatherless Olav Sigurdson saw in this American crusade a chance to vindicate his family's name.

The youth's tense personal drama snaps through the pages of this tale against a background of high-pitched excitement that follows the expedition from legendary Vinland into present-day Minnesota. There on a stone that reads "We were 8 Swedes and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the West ... " a terse record was written—a record that has lived since 1364 to give the LAND OF THE FREE its first saga of courage and determination!

From the dust jacket