Norse Sagas

The Norse sagas are Old Norse prose narratives written in Iceland chiefly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, recording earlier Viking-age events. The Vinland sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and Erik the Red’s Saga, describe Norse voyages from Greenland to North America around AD 1000, corroborated by the L’Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland. The sagas document open-boat ocean crossings, the knorr cargo ship, and coastal navigation by landmarks and latitude sailing, forming the principal literary record of medieval North Atlantic seafaring.