Leif Eriksson vs Christopher Columbus
Leif Eriksson: the First Orthodox Christian in America
Most people are aware that the Norse
explorer Leif Eriksson was the first European to reach America, some 500
years before Christopher Columbus, but very few know he arrived as part
of a Christian mission. Fewer still realize Leif Eriksson was an
Orthodox Christian. Having become a hirdman (guard) of the royal army of
King Olaf Tryggvason in Norway, Leif had himself accepted baptism into
the Christian faith, and had received from the King orders to travel to
Greenland with a priest in order to convert the Norse settlements there.
When their ships were blown off
course, Leif and his companions ended up in what we now know as
Newfoundland. After getting back on course, and converting the
Greenlanders to Christ, Lief and his crew returned to this Newfoundland,
where they built permanent settlements, settlements that included the
construction of churches. While the Norwegian presence in North America
was short lived, the fact that the first Christian presence on the
continent was Orthodox is significant.
Although King Olaf Tryggvason had
accepted baptism at Canterbury in England, the first Christian rulers in
Scandinavia were kinsmen of the rulers of Gardarike, or Kiev (The Rus,
of course, were not Slavs but Scandinavians, most hailing from Sweden).
King Olaf had himself grown up under the protection of Grand Prince
Valdemar (Vladimir), who famously converted the Rus to Christianity in
988. Norse Christianity was Orthodox in tone and appearance from the
beginning, and the last of Norway’s pre-schism Christian kings, Harald
Hardrada, was openly rebuked by Rome for adhering to Eastern traditions.
He brought into the Norwegian Church a number of priests and bishops
from Novgorod and Gardarike, and also Miklagard (Constantinople), where
he had headed the Varangian guard in service of the Byzantine emperor.
The first Christian presence in the Americas, then, was not merely
Orthodox in the sense of pre-schism, but had strong ties to the cultural
and ecclesiastical traditions of the Orthodox East. This fact can
clearly be seen in the interiors of the thousand year old Norwegian
stave churches that we see today.
With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon
(My thanks to Father Kristian, a
Norwegian Orthodox priest in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Great
Britain, whose writing on the subject I based my blog article. I hope I
didn’t get any of the facts incorrect.)
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