Did Vikings Discover America First? Myth v/s Reality….

The story of Christopher Columbus discovering America has long been known and hotly debated. Can it be called a discovery when the land was already inhabited? What about the fact that he stumbled across South and Central America, which are not what we generally define as North America? These questions are valid, but often overshadow another important inquiry: Why do we credit the discovery of the Americas by Europeans to Columbus and not the Vikings…

Roughly five centuries before Christopher Columbus even laid eyes on American land, it was “Leif Ericsson”, a Scandinavian Viking who stepped onto North American soil, and now it’s believed that he was the first European to ever do so. Leif Erickson was born in Iceland sometime around 970 A.D to the prominent Viking Explorer “Eric the Red”, Eric had first lived in Iceland after his father had been banished from their ancestral land of Norway from manslaughter but when Leaf was just a boy Eric himself was exiled from Iceland for following his Father’s Footsteps and murdering a neighbour this meant that leaf spent part of his childhood in Greenland where Eric had founded a new settlement, once in adulthood Erickson made the decision to journey to Norway at which time “King Olaf the first Tryggvason”, convinced the young Adventurer to convert to Christianity, the Monarch then gave Leaf the task of going back…