Leif Erickson Day

What the day is

Leif Erikson Day is observed on October 9. It is a formal United States observance, proclaimed annually by the president, honoring Leif Erikson and Nordic-American heritage more broadly.

The date has nothing to do with Erikson himself. October 9 was chosen because it marks the arrival in New York in 1825 of the Restauration, the ship carrying the first organized group of Norwegian immigrants to the United States.

Origin and background

Erikson was the son of Erik the Red, who had founded the Norse settlement in Greenland. Around the year 1000 he sailed west and reached a place the sagas call Vinland, and the Norse attempted settlement there.

For a long time this rested entirely on the Icelandic sagas, which are literary sources written down centuries after the events. That changed in the 1960s with the excavation at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, where archaeologists found the remains of a Norse settlement: turf buildings, iron nails, a smithy and characteristic Norse objects. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it confirms Norse presence in North America around that period.

Later dating work using the radiocarbon signature of a known solar storm has placed timber cutting at the site precisely in the year 1021, which makes it the earliest firmly dated European presence in the Americas.

The settlement did not last. The sagas describe conflict with the people already living there, whom the Norse called Skraelings, and the distance from Greenland made resupply impractical. The Norse withdrew within a few years.

How to take part

• Read about L'Anse aux Meadows. The archaeology is more interesting than the legend.
• Read one of the Vinland sagas. Both are short and available in good translation.
• Note what the day does not claim. Discovery is the wrong word for a continent that was already inhabited.
• Look into Nordic-American immigration history if you are in the upper Midwest, where most of it landed.