This country which is called Greenland was discovered and colonized from Iceland. Eric the Red was the name of the man, an inhabitant of Breidafirth, who went thither from here and settled at that place, which has since been called Ericsfirth. He gave a name to the country and called it Greenland and said that it must persuade men to go thither if it had a good name. They found there both east and west in the country the dwellings of men and fragments of boats and stone implements such that it might be perceived from these that that manner of people had been there who have inhabited Wineland and whom Greenlanders call Skraelings. And this when he set about the colonization of the country was fourteen or fifteen winters before the introduction of Christianity here in Iceland, according to what a certain man who himself accompanied Eric the Red thither informed Thorkell Gellison.
This last was an uncle of Ari, a man of liberal and inquiring mind and one of Ari’s most valued sources of knowledge as to the affairs of earlier generations.
The passage has been often quoted, but that Eric was largely justified in his nomenclature is less generally known. Greenland to the intending colonists would naturally mean not the ice-enshrouded waste of the almost continental interior nor yet the forbidding cliffs of the eastern coast guarded by a nearly impassable floe-laden Arctic current, but the really habitable thousand-mile fringe of uncovered land along the southwestern shore, on the average fifty miles wide and occasionally much wider. It was partly shut in by forbidding headlands and perverse currents, but feasible of access when the true course was disclosed. Some parts of this region were, and still are, green with grass and bright with summer flowers. Nansen, who certainly ought to know, declares that the Greenland sites chosen would have seemed more attractive than Iceland to an Icelander. Rink, who was connected with the Greenland government for a full generation, mentions certain places with special approval and regards life in most parts of the inhabited region quite contentedly.[187] Professor Hovgaard tells us:[188]
Icelandic Settlement
It was on this strip of land that the Icelanders settled at the end of the tenth century. Though barren on the outer shores and islands and on the hills, it is covered at the inner part of the fiords on the low level by a rich growth of grass together with stunted birch trees and various bushes, particularly willows. On the north side of the valleys crowberries (Empetrum nigrum) may be found....
Eric settled in Ericsfiord, the present Tunugdliarfik, at a place which he called Brattahlid, now Kagsiarsuk, in 985 or 986. Two distinct colonies were founded, the Eastern Settlement, extending from about Cape Farewell to a point well beyond Cape Desolation, comprising the whole of Julianehaab Bay and the coast past Ivigtut, and the Western Settlement, beginning about one hundred and seventy miles farther north at Lysufiord, [i.e. Agnafiord], the present Ameralikfiord, comprising the district of Godthaab.
The fiord next Ericsfiord in the Eastern Settlement was Einarsfiord, now Igalikofiord. These fiords were separated at their head by a low and narrow strip of land, the present Igaliko Isthmus. It was here, at Gardar, that the Althing of Greenland met, and here was also found the bishop’s seat, established at the beginning of the twelfth century. There were as many as sixteen churches in Greenland, for almost every fiord had its own church on account of the long distances and difficult traveling between the fiords.
Fig. 15—Map of the early Norse Western and Eastern Settlements of Greenland. Scale 1:6,400,000. (The inset below. 1:70,000,000, shows the relation of Norway, Iceland, and Greenland.)
The unfamiliar localities above named may be followed by the aid of the accompanying map ([Fig. 15]) copied from Finnur