Brattahlíð

Brattahlíð — 'the steep slope' — is Erik the Red's seat in Greenland, the chief homestead of the western colony and the launching-point of the boldest voyages in the corpus. From this farm on a green fjord at the edge of the habitable world, Erik ruled as the colony's leading man, and his children set out from here into history: Leif sailed from Brattahlíð on the voyage that found Vínland, and the later colonising expeditions to North America were mounted from its harbours. It is the saga world's farthest west foothold of ordinary life — a hall, a household, livestock on the thin pasture — from which men looked one ocean further and went. Brattahlíð is the image of the human edge: a single great farm on the rim of the known world, home to the family that touched a new continent.