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Today's Featured Biography
Leif Ericson
 The story of the Finding of Wineland the Good is contained, in somewhat differing versions, in two parchment books, the one belonging to the first, and the other to the last, quarter of the fourteenth century. Both agree in attributing the discovery to Leif the Lucky, the son of Eric the Red; though the Flatey Book says that he was induced to undertake this voyage by a certain Bjarne Herjulfson, who, having been driven out of his course by storms, had seen strange lands, but had not explored them.
Leif's father, Eric the Red, was, like most Norsemen of his day, an unruly and turbulent man, whose sword sat loosely in its sheath. He was born about the middle of the tenth century at Jaederen, in Norway, but was outlawed on account of a manslaughter, and set sail for Iceland, where he married a certain Thorhild, the daughter of Jorund and Thorbjorg the Ship-chested. But the same high temper and quarrelsome spirit which had compelled him to leave Norway got him into trouble also in his new home. He was forced by blood-feuds and legal acts of banishment to change his abode repeatedly, and finally he was declared an outlaw. Knowing that his life was forfeited, Eric, as a last desperate chance, equipped a ship, and sailed "in search of that land which Gunbjoern, the son of Ulf the Crow, had seen when he was driven westward across the main;" and promised, in case he found it, to return and apprise his friends of the discovery. Fortune favored him, and he found a great, in...
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