What Sagas Is Vinland Saga Based On?

The manga’s historical spine comes from the two Vinland sagas: the Saga of the Greenlanders (Grænlendinga saga) and the Saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauða), medieval Icelandic accounts of the same voyages that agree in outline and quarrel in detail, written down roughly two centuries after the events. Yukimura also drew on the Flateyjarbók, the great fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript that preserves its own version of the Greenland material.

From them come the frame of the fiction: Leif Erikson’s landfall, Gudrid’s marriages and journeys, Thorfinn’s settlement voyage, the meetings with the peoples the Norse called Skrælingjar. Yukimura has admitted he found the sagas long and hard going to read in full; what he took was their weather, spare, fatal, and strangely practical, rather than a script.

The England of the War Arc comes from the other side of the record: the documented Danish conquest under Sweyn Forkbeard and his son Canute, whose rise the manga follows closely.