These two medieval Icelandic Sagas, the Graenlendinga Saga and Eirik's Saga, tell one of the most exciting stories in the history of exploration: the discovery of America by Norsemen, five centuries before Columbus.

In spare and vigorous prose the sagas tell of the Norse journeys along the northern rim of the Atlantic, of how Eirik the Red founded an Icelandic colony in Greenland and how his son, Leif the Lucky, later sailed south to explore and if possible exploit the chance discovery by Bjarni Herjolfsson of an unknown land rich with grass and timber, abounding with game and fish, lovely in summer and mild in winter.

Although these sagas can certainly be read as literature—for they are rich in that curious blend of mystery and realism characteristic of Icelandic sagas—it is their references to the Norse discovery of North America that have haunted the American imagination.  The recently published fifteenth-century Vinland Map has made it all the more fascinating for the modern reader to go back to these ancient stories.

This modern translation presents the two sagas complete and unabridged, in the context of the most up-to-date research.  A full introduction by the translators, together with notes to accompany the text, a glossary of personal and place names, and a selection of maps, makes for an edition that restores the tales to their rightful place in the vast saga literature of medieval Iceland.

From the dust jacket of the 1968 hardcover reprint of the original