Violence ran in the family and travelled well. Eiríkr's father Þorvaldr Ásvaldsson left Norway after killings of his own and took his ten-year-old son to Hornstrandir, the bleakest corner of northwest Iceland, where the good land had been claimed generations earlier. Eiríkr married Þjóðhildr, moved south to better ground in Haukadalur, and promptly began losing neighbours. His slaves set off a landslide onto Valþjófr's farm; Valþjófr's kinsman Eyjólfr the Foul killed the slaves; Eiríkr killed Eyjólfr, and Hrafn the Dueller along with him. Pushed out to the islands of Breiðafjörður, he lent a set of carved bench-posts, setstokkar, to a man called Þorgestr, who declined to hand them back. Eiríkr took them by force and killed two of Þorgestr's sons on the way out. The assembly at Þórsnes heard the case and outlawed him for three years.
He sailed west from Snæfellsjökull in about 982 and used the sentence as a survey. Rounding the southern cape and working up the west coast, he wintered on one island, then another, and found fjord-heads with grass deep enough for cattle at a latitude where the ice broke early. The name was a sales decision. Eiríks saga rauða has him choosing Greenland because men would be readier to go there if the country had a good name. It worked. Twenty-five ships left Iceland in the summer of 985; eleven turned back or went down, and fourteen made land. Eiríkr took the head of Eiríksfjörður for himself and called the farm Brattahlíð, 'steep slope'. Inside a few generations the Eastern and Western Settlements between them held perhaps 5,000 people.
Christianity reached Brattahlíð by way of his own son, and Eiríkr wanted no part of it. Þjóðhildr converted, put up a small church out of sight of the house and, the saga reports, stopped sleeping with her husband, which he took badly. He nearly saw Vínland. Leifr asked him to come, but on the ride down to the ship Eiríkr's horse threw him; he read the fall as a verdict and went home. He died around 1003, in the sickness that swept the colony the winter after that voyage. In 1961 workmen digging foundations for a school hostel at Qassiarsuk struck human skulls. Below them lay a turf-walled church about two metres by three and a half, with 144 graves around it, men to the south and women to the north, no grave goods, no runic markers. Radiocarbon put the burials between roughly 1000 and 1200. The saga had said Þjóðhildr built a church, and there it was.