An Icelandic merchant is blown far to the west, falls among strangers who seem to speak Irish, and finds himself before an old chieftain who questions him in Norse about the people of Snæfellsnes. That is how Eyrbyggja saga closes the story of Björn Ásbrandsson, lover of Þuríðr of Fróðá. Since the nineteenth century some readers have taken the scene for a voyage to America. The text names neither America nor Great Ireland, and even the claim that the old man was Björn appears only as what people believed. This article reads the passages in order and tests what they can bear.
Björn Ásbrandsson, called Breiðvíkingakappi (“Champion of the people of Breiðavík”), lived, according to the story, in the late tenth century on the farm of Kambr in Breiðavík, on the south side of the Snæfellsnes peninsula. Nearly everything we can say about him comes from one of the sagas of Icelanders, Eyrbyggja saga, “the saga of the people of Eyr”. It was probably written in the mid or late thirteenth century, more than two hundred years after the events. I know of no contemporary record or archaeological trace that attests Björn as a person.
That shapes how he has to be read: as a literary character with a possible historical core whose extent cannot be measured. The saga does not even tell his life in one piece. The episodes lie scattered through chapters 29, 40, 47 and 64, among feuds, lawsuits and hauntings. Paula Vermeyden (University of Amsterdam), whose essay on this strand is the closest study I was able to use, draws a double conclusion. Taken alone, she calls it “een wel heel magere skaldensaga”, a very thin skald saga. Inside the work, though, no other sub-plot has so clear a job: the Björn fragments mark passing time and hold the stories about Þuríðr together.
Skald sagas tell of a poet who loves a woman who marries someone else, and who puts his feelings into verse. Vermeyden finds the building blocks in Björn’s story: unwelcome visits, an ambush by the husband, a child by the lover, sorcery against him, and finally departure and an end abroad. Seven stanzas are attributed to him. Whether he composed them is a question she deliberately sets aside.
Þuríðr is among the sharper-drawn women of the saga: daughter of Börkr, half-sister of the powerful Snorri goði, and widow of the slain Þorbjörn digri. Her second husband is the seafarer Þóroddr. His nickname skattkaupandi (“Scat-Catcher” in Morris’s English) goes back to the time he sold his boat to shipwrecked men of Earl Sigurðr of Orkney for a share of the tribute silver they had collected. The couple marry at Helgafell and move to Fróðá.
Why Björn did not marry her we are never told. There is no proposal, no refusal by Snorri, only hints of tension between the kindreds. “Het blijft daarom onduidelijk waarom zij elkaar niet krijgen,” Vermeyden notes: it remains unclear why the two do not get each other. The saga records merely that Björn now rides to Fróðá regularly, that people talk, and that Þóroddr’s protests change nothing.
The husband is egged on by the sons of Þórir viðleggr (“Wooden-Leg”), Örn and Valr. They offer help, and one day the little group lies in wait. Þuríðr has seen it coming and warns Björn, who answers with a stanza. In the fight at Digramúli he kills both brothers, while Þóroddr gets away with a slight wound. Snorri brings the case before the Þórsnes assembly, Björn’s father Ásbrandr pays the compensation, and Björn must leave the country for three years.
Now comes the passage on which Björn’s fame rests, and it is astonishingly short. According to Vermeyden the whole first journey abroad takes up about ten lines. Björn goes to Denmark, then south to Jomsborg, where Pálnatóki leads the Jomsvikings, and joins their fellowship. From then on he is called kappi, champion. He sees Styrbjörn the Strong take the stronghold, sails with the Jomsvikings to Sweden, fights at the Battle of Fýrisvellir where Styrbjörn falls, and then flees into the forest with the survivors. He stays with Pálnatóki as long as Pálnatóki lives. What exactly earned him the name the text does not say. Chapter 40 then reports that he was afterwards called the Champion of the Broadwickers, as Morris renders it.
Modern overviews date the battle to the mid-980s; Wikipedia gives 985–986 and lists Eyrbyggja saga among its sources alongside Saxo, runestones and other sagas. That supports the battle, not Björn: none of those other sources, as far as I could see them in the overviews, names an Icelandic fighter of this name. His time in Jomsborg therefore cannot be confirmed independently. The Jomsvikings themselves are known mainly from late sagas, as our neighbouring article sets out in detail.
After the years abroad the brothers Björn and Arnbjörn land at the harbour of Hraunhöfn. Björn has changed: the translation by William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon calls him “a very stately man”, who had shaped himself after the customs of foreign chiefs. At an assembly he talks openly with Þuríðr, and no one objects, because after so long a separation it seems only natural.
Then comes the line that matters. Talk turns to the boy Kjartan, and a man named Þórðr asks what Þóroddr might say about it, “hvor ykkar eiga mun sveininn”, which of you two the boy belongs to. Björn answers in verse and hints that the child has been foisted on the husband. The prose goes on treating Kjartan as Þóroddr’s son. On the strength of the stanzas Vermeyden considers him “vrijwel zeker”, almost certainly, Björn’s child. That is not something the saga states, and stanzas of this sort prove nothing about a real father.
After his father’s death Björn takes over the farm and keeps crossing the heath to Fróðá in winter. Þóroddr turns to sorcery: he pays a woman called Þorgríma galdrakinn (“Magic-Cheek”) to raise a storm against Björn. The Old Norse has hún, “she”: this is a woman. The blizzard catches Björn, but he survives and stays home for the rest of the winter. For more on this kind of paid magic, see our article on seiðr.
Kjartan and his mother later carry the saga’s most famous episode. In the Wonders of Fróðá, Þuríðr keeps the bedclothes of the dead Þórgunna against her last wishes, and Kjartan rides to his uncle Snorri for advice against the walking dead. That story is told in our article on the draugr. What counts here is simple: by the time the old chieftain in the west asks after these two people, the reader knows them well.
Þóroddr asks Snorri for help, and Snorri rides with a small band to Björn to kill him. Björn is alone in the home meadow working on a wagon, unarmed except for a little axe and a big whittling knife with a blade a span long. As Snorri rides up, he grabs the sleeve of his cloak and holds the knife where he could drive it into Snorri’s chest at any moment.
Björn admits he has played Snorri such a game that Snorri may well hold him guilty. He will promise only what lies in his power, “nor do I wot if I have might enow for this, if Thurid and I are in one country together”. So he promises that Snorri and Þóroddr will have no more grief from him for the next winters. The following day he rides to the ship at Hraunhöfn and takes a berth.
Vermeyden reads this as a deliberate reversal, a funhouse-mirror effect (“lachspiegel-effect”). The great chieftain who sets out with eight men stands helpless because his follower dares not strike, and the celebrated champion never gets to prove his reputation; he just leaves. The ship, the chapter ends, meets a northeaster that lasts a long time that summer, “and nought was heard of that ship for long after”.
Seventeen chapters later the saga returns to it. The plot has by now nearly reached the end of Snorri’s life. In the last years of King Olaf the Saint, so the dating runs, the merchant Guðleifr Guðlaugsson of Straumfjörðr sails to Dublin. Heading home to Iceland he is driven by north-east winds “far to the west, and south-west”, with no land in sight. Norse seafaring knew such cases as hafvilla, being lost at sea. Late in the summer the men sight a large land they do not recognise and find a good harbour.
Many hundreds of locals gather. Guðleifr’s men cannot place them, “but it rather appeared to them that they spoke Irish”. The crew are bound, marched inland and brought before an assembly, which debates whether to kill them or distribute them as unfree labourers. Then a great body of men rides up with a large banner in the middle, and under it an old, white-haired man to whom everyone bows. He addresses the strangers in Norse, has Guðleifr name his home in Borgarfjörðr, and goes on to ask about the men of Borgarfjörðr and Breiðafjörðr, about Snorri goði, about Þuríðr and above all about Kjartan.
After conferring with twelve of his people, he frees the prisoners and advises a quick departure. He gives no name. He hands Guðleifr a gold ring and a sword, and a commission to go with them:
“Say that he sends them who was a better friend of the lady of Froda, than of her brother, Godi of Helgafell; but if any man therefore thinks that he knows who has owned these articles, then say these my words, that I forbid any one to come to me, for it is the most dangerous expedition, unless it happens as fortunately with others at the landing place, as with you …”Eyrbyggja saga, ch. 64, English text in Reeves/Beamish/Anderson, The Norse Discovery of America (1906; public domain; the page names no individual translator). I could check the Old Norse of this passage only in part of one clause.
Guðleifr reaches Ireland late in the autumn, winters in Dublin and carries the gifts to Iceland the next summer. Then comes the sentence on which everything hangs: people held it for certain that this man was Björn, “and no other account to be relied on is there in confirmation of this, except that which is now given here”. The narrator himself says he has nothing further in hand.
The chapter mentions no Vínland and no Hvítramannaland. It gives no direction beyond the vague drift and no length of voyage. The foreign land stays nameless, even though some overviews present it otherwise. Yet the saga knows the name Vínland elsewhere, when it refers to an expedition there. One chapter of the 1906 volume saw this clearly: many writers had equated the land with “White-men’s-land”, but the identification was “entirely wrought by the modern commentator”, and the story had “a decidedly fabulous appearance”.
Björn’s identity is equally thinly attested. The old man gives himself away with a riddle about the lady of Fróðá, the audience solves it at once, and that is all there is. Vermeyden notes that the identification has no other evidence than the story itself. As narrative it is beautifully neat: the lover gets an honourable ending, the beloved a ring, the son a sword, and right afterwards the saga moves on to Snorri’s death in 1031. That is exactly why caution is due. An episode that fits the composition this well, in my judgement, argues against a travel report.
The name under which Björn’s land became famous comes from other texts. Landnámabók, the Icelandic Book of Settlements, tells of Ari Másson, in older translations Ari Marsson, who was driven to Hvítramannaland, “which is called by some persons Ireland the Great”, in Old Norse Írland it mikla. It lies in the west near Vínland the Good, six dœgr west of Ireland; a dœgr is strictly a half-day; what distance it implies cannot be fixed exactly. Ari could not leave and was baptised there.
The passage names its informants. Hrafn Hlymreksfari, the Limerick-farer, told of it first. Then Þorkell Gellisson reports that Icelanders heard from Earl Þorfinnr of Orkney that Ari had been recognised there and was held in honour, but not allowed to leave.
Eiríks saga rauða supplies the third piece. In chapter 12, two boys captured in Markland tell of a land opposite their own where people in white clothes carry poles with strips of material and shout loudly, and the saga supposes this to be the land of the white men. That is not an observation but an interpretation of a report given by children in a foreign language.
Ari and the old man of chapter 64 share a striking pattern: an Icelander cast away, highly honoured among strangers, shut out from return, known at home only through third parties. Björn fits it perfectly, yet the saga does not draw the link. Later reading does, prompted by the west and the connection with Ireland. Fridtjof Nansen in 1911 even thought it clear that Björn and Ari were one saga figure.
Nineteenth-century scholarship took the step to America. Carl Christian Rafn, editor of the Antiquitates Americanae (1837), looked for Great Ireland on the east coast of North America: according to the commentary cited below, in the country south of Chesapeake Bay, with the Carolinas, Georgia and East Florida. The commentary accompanying the Guðleifr passage in the 1906 volume goes further and draws lines on the map: take one course from Iceland and one from western Ireland, both before a north-east wind, and they intersect “on the southern shores of the United States, somewhere about Carolina or Georgia”. In support it cites a Shawnee tradition of white men with iron tools, a chart of “Albania” said to have been owned by the Icelandic priest Erlend Thordson, named for 1568, and the traveller Lionel Wafer’s remark that his Scottish Gaelic helped him learn the language of Darién. The commentary itself knows nothing more of the chart, the tradition is undatable, the language note proves nothing: these are not evidence.
The course calculation looks exact but assumes what it needs to prove: that Björn and Guðleifr arrived in the same land, that the wind blew steadily for weeks, and that the saga passes on such details as navigational data. Björn’s ship is never mentioned again after it sails. Later writers looked for Great Ireland elsewhere, Farley Mowat on the west coast of Newfoundland, for instance. Store norske leksikon, in its entry on Ari Másson, still says cautiously that the land may have been the east coast of North America.
Set the saga next to what is known of pre-Columbian America and the Vínland voyages, and little is left. The weighing below is my own, not a cited scholarly position.
The riders. The chieftain appears with a mounted troop. There were no horses in America at this time; Europeans brought them back only after 1492. I could read the passage only in English translation (“rode a great body of men”), not in Old Norse, and I do not know whether the literature already makes this point.
The society. Banner, court, assembly, unfree labourers, laws said to have been broken: the narrator describes an order that looks European. The Vínland sagas portray their Skrælingar quite differently. Irish settlers in America, who would be needed to explain all this, have no archaeological support.
The distance. The six dœgr apply to Great Ireland, not to Guðleifr’s land, but they show what people imagined. According to our article on Viking navigation, Landnámabók reckons five dœgr from Reykjanes to Ireland. Great Ireland would thus lie scarcely farther from Ireland than Iceland does. The Atlantic to Newfoundland is roughly twice that, by my own rough map estimate. Such figures should not be pressed, but they do not suggest a distant continent.
The way back. Guðleifr sails and lands in Ireland that same autumn. That is not impossible, but it is not told as the great ocean crossing it would be.
The finds. That Norse people reached North America around the year 1000 is secured by L’Anse aux Meadows. That site lies in Newfoundland, however, and has no connection to Björn, Guðleifr or Great Ireland. I know of no Norse trace in Carolina or Georgia.
So the answer runs: the voyage to America cannot be proved, and the details of the text tend to count against it. No one can rule out that a lost Icelander washed up somewhere in the west. But what the saga tells is no testimony to that.
Fridtjof Nansen treated Hvítramannaland in 1911, in In Northern Mists (vol. 2, ch. IX), as a land of legend: it may derive from the ancient Isles of the Blest and Christian Irish legend, and he links the name, among other things, to the white-clad people of the Isle of Anchorites in the Navigatio Brandani. I read that chapter only in excerpts through the retrieval tool. According to Wikipedia newer work follows him, with a reference to Matthias Egeler’s entry in Germanische Altertumskunde Online (2015), and Kirsten Seaver is cited for reading it as a fabled country born of fading knowledge of the west. I have not read these two titles. The Irish immrama are tales of sea voyages to marvellous islands; the legend of Saint Brendan is related.
The Irish derivation is not so simple, though. Jonas Wellendorf’s article “The Stranger-King in Hvítramannaland” in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 18 (2022), of which I could read only the abstract, rejects the idea of a wholesale borrowing from Irish voyage tales. Hvítramannaland, it argues, is “a fictional space” combining widespread ideas of stranger-kings and lost islands with a notion of Ireland as strange, forbidding and marvellously paradoxical, a place from which most would be advised to keep a safe distance. The term stranger-king means an outsider who arrives from elsewhere and becomes ruler.
Björn’s last appearance fits this remarkably well. He expressly warns against following him. That is the very distance the abstract speaks of, but it does not name Björn. The connection is therefore my own reading; whether the article itself takes it up I could not check.
Was Björn Breiðvíkingakappi a historical person? This cannot be clearly established. His circle, Snorri goði for example, is attested elsewhere too, but for Björn himself I know only the saga as a source.
Was Kjartan of Fróðá his son? The prose treats Kjartan as Þóroddr’s son; Björn’s stanzas and the conversation in chapter 40 suggest otherwise. Within the story much speaks for it; historically it cannot be settled.
What does Hvítramannaland mean? “Land of the white men”. It is also called Írland it mikla, Great Ireland. The name stands in Landnámabók; Eiríks saga rauða likewise refers its report from Markland to a land of white people.
Is the Guðleifr story in a Vínland saga? No, only in Eyrbyggja saga. The Vínland sagas tell neither of him nor of Björn.
Vinland: sources and finds · The Jomsvikings · The sagas of Icelanders · Hafvilla: lost at sea · Viking navigation · The draugr and the Wonders of Fróðá · Seiðr · Leif Erikson
Vinland · The Jomsvikings · The Icelandic Sagas · Was Quetzalcoatl a Viking? A Theory Undone by Its Own Dates · Skrælingar: a disparaging word, many peoples, and the open question of whom the Norse actually met.
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