I, Lief Erickson, was born in 980, to my father, the glorious Viking explorer Erick the Red. My father had picked up this name, "the red," because of the dashing fire red color of his hair. This color, was not only reflected in his the color of his hair, but the color of his passion.
My grandparents had left their European home of Norway with an account of manslaughter. Europe had grown into a hostile environment, and many were looking for solutions. The slaves of my father, and of many farmers in Iceland had started a landslide, and were refusing to work for the wages, and food they were provided. Our neighbors had started to kill the slaves, and my father in turn killed them, returning the deed, eye for an eye.
In 982, my father was banished from Iceland for three years for numerous counts of manslaughter. A man by the name Throgest had possession of mystical ornaments that were apart of my family for centuries. When my father confronted Throgest about obtaining his rightful inheritance, Throgest sent him away. My father would not leave without his dues, no matter how much my mother Thorild cried out to him to leave them behind, and turn his love towards the safety of his family. He was obsessed!
My father had just finished building a new home, when he had decided that his family ornaments where too precious to just give up. In a craze, he snuck into Throgest's home, and held him captive there. He took his prized possessions, and retreated. Throgest was filled with envy, and was not forgiving. Taking a few men with him, Throgest lite a torch and threw it into the home where we had just settled, there in Oxney. Our closer neighbors woke up and took me and my brothers, and mother to safety, as battle ensued in front of the burning cottage during the beginning of a cold night.
My father took out his sword, with his fellows next to him and slaughtered Throgest, and other men, who had stood laughing and calling out with heated desire for what they thought belonged to them. Instead of leaving with riches they had come for, they had left with cries of wallowing death.
A general assembly of Germanic people of Oxney, called simply the "thing" gathered together and voted that my father, the Red, leave Iceland, and so he was band, in his exile for three years from Iceland.
During his exile, caused oddly by his own craze for some jeweled family beams, he founded a new territory, and in revulsion of the cold name of Ice land, named the island Greenland. He thought such a name would certainly lure settlers, and make people attracted to coming to the continent. There were many people going through a famine during this time in Ice Land. This famine was really the another cause of my father's fury. The people there had become convinced that my father had found a new hope for his Celtic brothers.
The poorest people from Iceland, and those whom heard of it in other Celtic regions, all begin to migrate to the Greenland, and built new settlements there. A dawn of richness of the land had risen for the European people.
The king of Norway, Olaf I, had put me in command of several men. With them I made a companion to undiscovered territories. Our family, the Thorvaldsson's, or the Ericks, discovery of the new world had put us back into accord with Norway. The alliance may not have existed if it weren't for good king Olaf's transition of his state to Christianity, making him obliged to forgiveness, as well as pay us handsomely for our service.
Olaf had even Baptized me in the River of Nid, where Olaf had set up his own Kingdom of Trondhiem. In the same year, in 1000 A.D. Sadly, and all too early, Olaf was killed when sailing home with 11 ships, by a band of seventy ships, pirated by the King of Sweden, and a Jarl of Lade (civilians of Lade, Norway). Olaf threw himself overboard, and was never seen again. After this the the Jarls of Lade took over Norway. This battle, the battle of Svolder, may have been caused by Olaf's conversion to Christianity, betraying Norse paganism.
I was thirty years old in 1000 A.D. when I landed on a corner of a land, I would call wineland, or vineland, because of the abundant existence of grape trees. Olaf had converted me and my family to Christianity, excluding my father who had honored Norse paganism. We spent most of our time settling there in wineland, my father had even died in Greenland and I had not heard of it till I was was very old. building farmers and Church's, establishing a lasting Christian country, we separated from the pagan Norway.
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