Leifr was the son of Eiríkr the Red, the outlaw who had been exiled from Iceland for killings and answered by naming an ice-sheet 'Greenland' and selling it to settlers — a family, in other words, that treated the western horizon as an asset class. The two Vínland sagas disagree on how Leifr found the new country, and the disagreement is instructive. Eiríks saga rauða has him blown off course sailing home from Norway and stumbling on it by accident. Grœnlendinga saga, generally the better-trusted account, gives the sighting to a merchant named Bjarni Herjólfsson, who saw wooded land to the west some fifteen years earlier, declined to go ashore, and sailed on — and has Leifr buy Bjarni's ship a decade and a half later specifically to go back and land on it. The first version makes him lucky; the second makes him the only man who thought a rumour was worth a voyage.
He worked the coast southward and named what he found with a surveyor's flatness: Helluland, 'flat-stone land,' all glacier-scoured rock; Markland, 'forest land,' the timber that treeless Greenland desperately needed; and finally Vínland, where the sagas claim grapes grew and no frost came, and where his crew wintered in houses they built themselves. The epithet came on the way home. Leifr pulled fifteen shipwrecked people off a reef, kept them and their cargo alive, and was Leifr hinn heppni — the Lucky — ever after. Heimskringla adds a second errand: Óláfr Tryggvason sent him back to Greenland to convert it, and he did, over the loud objection of his father, who had no interest in a religion that disapproved of his career.
For nine hundred years this was filed as saga embroidery. Then in 1960 the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad, reading the sagas as sailing directions rather than literature, followed the coast to the northern tip of Newfoundland and found sod-walled house foundations at L'Anse aux Meadows; his wife, the archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, excavated them through 1968 and pulled up a bronze cloak-pin, a spindle whorl, and iron nails smelted on site — Norse work, not Indigenous, in an Icelandic-Greenlandic building style. In 2021 the date was nailed down to the year: a cosmic-ray storm in 993 CE left a radiocarbon spike in every tree alive at the time, and wooden debris at the site shows exactly 28 growth rings past that spike before a steel blade cut it. Someone with iron tools felled that tree in 1021. The sagas were reporting.