Eiríkr rauði (Erik the Red)

Erik the Red is the founder of Greenland — a hot-tempered, restless man whose killings kept driving him west to the edge of the world. Outlawed from Norway with his father for manslaughter, then outlawed again from Iceland for more killings, Erik used his three exile years to explore the great ice-bound land to the west, and came back with a salesman's masterstroke: he named it Greenland, reasoning that men would more readily go to a country with an attractive name. Settlers followed, and he established the colony from his seat at Brattahlid, becoming its leading man. Father of Leif the Lucky and the fierce Freydis, he is the patriarch of the family that would sail on to Vínland and touch North America. Erik is the saga world's image of the outlaw-as-pioneer: a violent man with nowhere left to go but further, who turned exile into the founding of a new world.