Around year 1000 the vikings' went to Vinland, which was their name for North America.

You can read about it in two sagas:

The Saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða) has a description of Erik's son Leif leading an expedition to Vinland:

https://www.sagadb.org/eiriks_saga_rauda.en

The Greenland Saga (Grænlendinga saga) has more information on the journey if you can read Icelandic, but there is no English translation in this database at the moment.

The actual discovery was not by Erik but by an earlier voyage around 985 by Bjarni, who navigated the coast but decided not to enter the unknown land. The later voyage was inspired by his information.

The vikings considered the journey from Greenland to Vinland the most dangerous journey in their trading network, navigating storms and icebergs in their open boats. However, Vinland provided a source of valuable wood, a scarce resource around their homes in Greenland.

There is archeological evidence of their visits on Newfoundland. You can visit their site in L'Anse aux Meadows with distinct viking houses and metal artefacts:

https://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/top-destinations/lanse-...

Man there are a lot here. I got to read a few of these sagas (in English) years ago and many of them are fun. Think crazy soap opera but with swords, boats and bows and all before 1000AD. Somebody else recommended the Saga of Erik the Red and the Greenland Saga. Those are great.

For an early look at democracy vs mob rule the The Story of Burnt Njal is great.

For great poetry[1], adventurism and, well, funny-shaped heads, Egil's Saga is also great.

If I remember, a lot of the Sagas will reference other ones, and the style definitely gives you the sense that they were spoken for centuries before they were written down. It's also worth noting that many (most?) were written down by Christians based on the tellings. Some people think the outlook of the Christians writing down these mostly-pagan tales comes through a little more than the original telling. Sorry I don't have a source for that.

If I remember correctly many Icelanders can trace their ancestry back to the subjects of some of these Sagas.

If you decide to read some, what I found was that I was mostly lost in the first saga, but by the third or fourth in a row the style started making more sense. It gets immersive.

[1] Old Norse poetry doesn't easily translate into English but a lot of the style still comes through. They relied heavily on kennings. There's a good description on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning

Random fact; this website is created and maintained by Sveinbjörn Þórðarson who also made Platypus (https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Platypus) and Sloth (https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Sloth) — software that Mac nerds might be familiar with.

Sveinbjörn is a ball of energy that just radiates positives for human society.

This is a useful resource, but it is a pity that the Icelandic originals are in a spelling based on Modern Icelandic, not the standard used in Old Norse scholarship. For example, writing the nominative singular ending -r as -ur, and the letter ö for a certain low vowel instead of ǫ.

Consequently, anyone learning Old Norse from a textbook published in the last century will have some mental conversion to deal with when using this site.

Takk fyrir þessar rafbækur.

These are the Icelandic Sagas, which means stories taking place on Iceland.

In addition there exist a number of sagas written in Icelandic which takes place before the settlement of Iceland. These are often more fantastic and with more supernatural elements and sometimes guest appearances by the Norse Gods (although the authors are always quick to point out that they are not actually Gods, but just Turks.)

I took my name "rugnir" from a compination of two names from a of names mentioned in the icelandic saga. I love these kinds of old mythological epics. I recommend the epic of gilgamesh, beowulf too

Anyone know something like this but for Indian ancient stories? Would love to find even more sites with the tales before writing.