An Icelandic merchant wants to visit his father, loses his course in the fog and sights coasts that appear on no sea chart of his day. He turns the ship and sails on. That is how the Saga of the Greenlanders tells the story of Bjarni Herjólfsson, and it is one of the oddest scenes in Norse tradition: perhaps the first European to lay eyes on the American mainland does not set foot on it. Bjarni was no king and no conqueror. He was a trader, the son of a settler and later a follower of a Norwegian earl. This article sets the testimonies side by side, checks the date of 985 or 986, asks what he can have seen, and separates saga, archaeology and modern interpretation. Bjarni himself is not attested archaeologically. We say so at the outset.
Bjarni Herjólfsson (sometimes spelled “Biarni Heriulfsson” in older English) belongs to the founding generation of the Greenland settlement. He was the son of Herjólfr Bárðarson and his wife Þorgerðr, and he sailed as a merchant with his own ship. The sources reveal little more about him. Neither his year of birth nor of death is recorded, and there is no description of his looks or character. We know him from a single narrative, written down a good while after the events.
That is why classification matters. Bjarni is an explorer in the sense of a sighting, not a leader in the sense of a warlord or king. He founded nothing, conquered nothing and left no descendants known to have made history. His significance lies in a voyage of a few weeks and in what others made of it afterwards. Anyone who places him among the “Viking leaders” does so with a caveat, and the caveat belongs to the story: he was a ship’s master, owner and trader.
The story of Bjarni’s voyage stands in the Grænlendinga saga, the Saga of the Greenlanders. It survives only in the Flateyjarbók, a large Icelandic manuscript of the late 14th century, where it appears as two short tales (þættir) inserted into the saga of King Óláfr Tryggvason. Scholars disagree about its age. Jón Jóhannesson dated it around 1200 in 1956 and thought it older than the other Vinland saga; Ólafur Halldórsson argued in 1978 that both texts arose independently in the early 13th century; Helgi Þorláksson suggested in 2001 that it might be the younger one. I read this only through a summary of the scholarly debate. The question is not settled.
The second saga is Eiríks saga rauða, the Saga of Erik the Red. It exists in two versions, in the Hauksbók (14th century) and the Skálholtsbók (15th century), both said to descend from a 13th-century original. Bjarni Herjólfsson does not appear in it. There Leif Eriksson is blown off course on his way back from Norway and stumbles on Vinland. The only Bjarni in that saga is Bjarni Grímólfsson, who commands another ship. The brief for this article named “Flateyjarbók / Hauksbók” for Bjarni. More precisely: Bjarni’s voyage stands only in the Flateyjarbók saga, not in the Hauksbók.
Two other texts allow comparison. The Landnámabók, the Book of Settlements, names Herjólfr Bárðarson and his kinship with the settler Ingólfr Arnarson according to the German Wikipedia, but says nothing about a voyage to America; the location of the farm near Eyrarbakki rests on a 19th-century description. And around 1075 Adam of Bremen wrote in his description of the northern islands of an island called Vinland, named for wild-growing vines, and named King Sven of Denmark as his informant. He does not mention Bjarni. At most, Adam confirms that people in the north spoke of a land in the west in the 11th century. He says nothing of Bjarni’s voyage.
Bjarni’s father Herjólfr came, according to the Landnámabók, from the kin of Ingólfr Arnarson, the first Norwegian traditionally settled permanently in Iceland. His namesake grandfather is said to have received land on the Reykjanes peninsula from Ingólfr. Herjólfr himself lived at a farm called Drepstokkr near present-day Eyrarbakki on the south coast. Exactly where it stood is a reconstruction; there is no certainty.
The pattern the saga draws matters more. Bjarni spent his summers as a trader on voyages, above all to Norway, and stayed in Iceland between them. Such rhythms were normal: one sailed in the summer half-year, wintered with relatives or hosts and built trading ties. The saga tells that on arriving in Iceland Bjarni learned that his father had already sailed with Erik the Red to Greenland. More on Erik and the settlement of Greenland in the article on Erik the Red.
The year is a calculation, not a testimony. The Saga of the Greenlanders gives no year. The Icelandic scholar Ari Þorgilsson says in the Íslendingabók, written in the early 12th century, that Erik settled Greenland when it was fourteen or fifteen winters before Christianity came to Iceland. If one places the adoption of Christianity at the Althing in 999 or 1000, one arrives at 985 or 986, depending on how the winters are counted and which year one takes for the conversion. English Wikipedia gives summer 985 for Erik’s departure with the settlers; the Canadian biographical dictionary (T. J. Oleson) dates Bjarni’s voyage to 986. Both are approximations, and a margin of one year cannot be closed.
A peculiarity of saga chronology adds to this: it counts winters and summers, not calendar years, and it was written down generations later. A year of fuzziness is normal in this kind of source. “Around 985/986” is therefore the honest phrasing. The tradition offers no more. How old Bjarni was at the time cannot be answered either.
According to the saga, Bjarni resolved at once to follow his father although nobody aboard knew the way to Greenland. After three days at sea fog and north winds set in, and the ship drifted for many days without orientation. When the sun returned, the direction could be fixed, and land came into view.
The first coast was flat and wooded, with low hills. Bjarni said it could not be Greenland, for he had been told of glaciers and mountains there. The crew wanted to land. He refused and sailed on, northward; the translations and summaries I read do not agree on the compass direction. After two days a second land came in sight, again flat and wooded. Now the crew pressed him harder, because they needed wood and water. Bjarni held firm and, as the saga puts it, lost the men’s goodwill. After three more days came a third land, high, mountainous and glaciated; Bjarni took it for an inhospitable island and passed it by. Four days later he reached a coast that matched what he had been told about Greenland, and he landed at a headland below which his father’s farm lay.
Two things are worth noting. First, the saga portrays a decision: Bjarni does not want to land, he wants to reach his father. Second, the text records that the crew disagreed. Whether the scene went this way, we do not know. It is at any rate written down the way people in the 13th century imagined such a voyage.
“Biarni said that he did not believe that it could be Greenland.” … “They alleged that they were in need of both wood and water.” … “but Biarni would not consent to this.”Grænlendinga saga, Bjarni’s voyage (chapter 2 in the We Vikings numbering); English translation by Arthur Middleton Reeves, 1890, here from the reprint in the Fordham Sourcebook
That Bjarni lost his way is less astonishing than the fact that he found his goal anyway. Norse seamen reckoned on the open sea in dœgr, half-days of about twelve hours. The Landnámabók, in the Sturlubók version, gives four dœgr from Snæfellsnes in western Iceland to Greenland; the father’s farm, by contrast, lay on the south coast according to the reconstruction, so the figure fits only roughly. More on sailing directions, latitude estimates and the famous sunstone in the article How the Vikings navigated, which also explains why the sunstone remains an interpretation and not an established instrument.
No magnetic compass was available. In fog, what remained was wind, swell, the behaviour of birds and whales and, once the sun came through, its position. The saga does not say how Bjarni fixed the direction after the weather cleared; it says only that it was fixed. That is a gap one should not fill with guesswork.
On currents the saga is silent. General geography helps here, and it is expressly a modern interpretation: a ship drifting west south of Iceland and then pressed southward by north winds can end up in waters where the East Greenland Current runs south around Cape Farewell and the Labrador Current runs south along the North American coast. Which course Bjarni’s ship really took cannot be read from this, because the saga’s time-spans are rough and the winds are unknown.
Whether Bjarni saw North America has been debated since the 19th century, and the answers diverge. The Canadian T. J. Oleson read the three lands in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography as Newfoundland, Labrador and Baffin Island. Even that is not undisputed. A 1986 Smithsonian teachers’ newsletter instead assigns the first land to New England or southwestern Nova Scotia, the second tentatively to Nova Scotia and the third tentatively to Newfoundland. For the later names Leif gave the coasts, a separate range applies: Helluland is mostly equated with Baffin Island, Markland “probably” with Labrador, Vinland “possibly” with Newfoundland.
The differences show how thin the descriptions are. “Flat and wooded” fits many coasts. There is also the problem of direction: depending on the translation, the course after the sightings runs north or northeast, and the day counts are estimates. It is conceivable that Bjarni saw parts of the North American coast; it is not proven. All that is certain is that the saga has him do so. And even the land of the third sighting, which he took for an island, could, if one follows Oleson, have been Baffin Island. Whoever says “first European in America” compresses this uncertainty into a label.
After arriving, Bjarni stayed with his father, gave up sailing and later took over the farm, according to the summaries I read. Later, however, he travelled to Norway and came to Earl Eirik. The earl received him well. Bjarni told of his voyage, and people found it a shortcoming that he could report so little about the lands he had sighted. In Reeves’s translation the saga words the reproach as people thinking he had been “lacking in enterprise.” Nevertheless he became one of the earl’s men and sailed back to Greenland the following summer.
The reproach looks backward: it measures Bjarni against what became known after Leif’s voyage. Bjarni himself, as the saga tells it, had a father to reach and a crew to look after, and he sailed without a chart.
Who is “Earl Eirik”? This is a question of dating. According to the Norwegian encyclopedia Store norske leksikon, Eirik Hákonarson of the house of Lade ruled Norway as regent from about 1000 to 1015, after his father Hákon was killed in 995. As a ruler he does not fit a voyage around 985/986. If the visit is placed after 1000, as the Smithsonian newsletter does with a return to Greenland around 1002, a coherent picture emerges. As far as I have read it, the saga gives no year. Helgi Þorláksson also considered in 2001, as one summary reports, that the “Earl Eiríkr” might be a back-projection of the late medieval King Eiríkr. That is a hypothesis, not a result. On the earls of Lade see The earls of Lade, and on the king Olaf Tryggvason.
The episode ends with a purchase. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, bought Bjarni’s ship and hired thirty-five men. He sailed the route in reverse and, unlike Bjarni, went ashore: first at a stony land he called Helluland, then at a wooded one he called Markland, and finally in Vinland. The saga alludes to Bjarni’s restraint in the process.
Comparing Leif’s voyage with Bjarni’s reveals the saga’s design: Bjarni stands for the sighting, Leif for the landing. The other saga offers the counterpart without Bjarni. Which version lies closer to reality is open; scholars regard Leif’s accidental discovery in Eiríks saga as part of a later invented mission story and therefore trust the Saga of the Greenlanders more, while others do not accept its sequence without question. The comparison is laid out in the article on Leif Eriksson and in the fact check of “Vinland Saga”.
Herjólfsnes lies at the southern tip of Greenland, about 50 kilometres northwest of Cape Farewell, on the west shore of Herjólfsfjord. It was one of the southernmost farms of the Eastern Settlement. The name contains that of Herjólfr: the farm is attributed to him, and according to tradition Bjarni moved in with him. Archaeologically nothing can be traced back to a person. The visible ruins are those of a 13th-century church, perhaps standing on an older one; whether there is a burial phase from the 11th century is not apparent to me from the texts I read.
The cemetery made the place famous. A gravestone drew attention as early as the early 19th century, and digging took place in 1839/1840. When the shore eroded, the Dane Poul Nørlund led an excavation for the National Museum of Denmark in 1921 and published it in 1924 as Buried Norsemen at Herjolfsnes. According to an evaluation by Niels Lynnerup, about 110 to 120 burials were recovered, but about 200 were estimated in the investigated area, often in three or four layers. Nørlund could secure the remains of 26 people. The dead were wrapped in clothing, hoods, caps and garments, all of wool. They are almost the only surviving medieval garments from Greenland. The styles resemble European fashions of the 14th and 15th centuries, such as long hoods and the “Burgundian” hat. According to Lynnerup, radiocarbon measurements gave a range of 1400 to 1450. A rune stick lay in the grave of a woman named Gudveig. The finds are in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
Two caveats belong here. The dead lived some four hundred years after Bjarni, and nobody can say whether descendants of Herjólfr were among them. And the earlier reading of the skeletons by F. C. C. Hansen (1924), that the settlers had physically degenerated, is now considered methodologically flawed; according to Lynnerup it rested on outdated formulas and on bones warped in wet turf. Hansen found no traces of mixing with the Inuit, and according to Lynnerup that still holds. Whether the Herjólfsnes dead wore imported cloth or local products is a research question of its own that I do not answer here. General background on dress in the article Viking clothing.
In 1960 a local resident led the Norwegian Helge Ingstad to grassy mounds at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Between 1961 and 1968 the Ingstads excavated eight buildings. Canada declared the site a national historic site in 1968, and UNESCO placed it on the World Heritage List in 1978. Radiocarbon measurements gave a mean around 1014 with a range of 990 to 1050; a 2021 study in Nature arrived at the year 1021 via tree rings. According to what I read, L’Anse aux Meadows is the only confirmed Norse site in North America outside Greenland.
Whether it was Vinland is disputed. And the site has nothing to do with Bjarni: he is not attested there, no find bears his name, and his sighting, if it happened, falls in the years around 985/986, some 35 years before the felling date. The site shows only that Norse people reached American land around the year 1000 and that the saga narrative was not conjured from thin air. It is no confirmation of the details. Further reading: Vinland.
One can speak of a triad: written source, archaeology, modern interpretation. The written source tells the voyage, but late and with literary intent. Archaeology attests the settlement in Greenland, medieval people at Herjólfsnes and a Norse station in Newfoundland around 1000 to 1021, but not Bjarni. Modern interpretation supplies identifications of the coasts that do not agree. Add time references that cannot be pinned down to better than a year, and the open question of when the visit to the earl took place.
A cautious picture follows: there is some reason to think the Saga of the Greenlanders preserves an older memory that someone before Leif had sighted land west of Greenland. There is equally some reason to think Bjarni functions as a narrative figure who prepares Leif’s voyage. The two cannot be played off against each other. The Greenland settlement lasted into the 15th century; the last written notice is a wedding at Hvalsey, which the annals place in 1408, though the dating is uncertain. See also Vikings in the North Atlantic.
Who was Bjarni Herjólfsson? An Icelandic merchant and ship owner, son of the settler Herjólfr Bárðarson. The Saga of the Greenlanders has him sight unknown coasts around 985/986 on the way to Greenland.
Did Bjarni really see North America? That cannot be established with certainty. The description of the three coasts fits Newfoundland, Labrador and Baffin Island, but other identifications have been proposed. Bjarni himself is not attested archaeologically.
Why did he not land? The saga explains it by his goal: he wanted to reach his father. The crew pressed to go ashore because wood and water were short; Bjarni refused.
What does Leif Eriksson have to do with Bjarni? According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, Leif bought Bjarni’s ship and sailed his route in reverse order. Eiríks saga rauða does not know this link.
Are there finds relating to Bjarni? No. The cemetery of Herjólfsnes dates to the 15th century, L’Anse aux Meadows to about 1021.
Leif Eriksson · Erik the Red · Vinland · “Vinland Saga” fact check · Thorfinn Karlsefni · How the Vikings navigated · Vikings in the North Atlantic · Ingólfr Arnarson · The earls of Lade
Leif Erikson · Erik the Red · Vinland · Vinland Saga fact-check · Thorfinn Karlsefni.
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