Am I mad? Following the route of a semi-mythical character
A tricky question arises when you try to follow in the tracks of someone whose only historical trace is in a saga. The Icelandic sagas are stories of lives lived, battles fought, feuds held, trolls hunted, religious conversions, bodies raised from the dead, shipwrecks, monopods and monsters. There is a parallel to the Greek myths, with their mixture of magical beasts and human beings, gods, goddesses and realistic geography. The characters in the Greek myths (Helen of Troy, Odysseus, Agamemnon and all) are fairly universally agreed, these days, not to have existed. (Or very probably not, anyway.) It's this question that we have to ask of saga characters too. How much really happened? How real is Erik the Red? Am I setting off on a voyage that was made all those years ago, or am I on a fool's quest, following after someone invented for an evening's entertainment?
The case against the truth of the sagas (in general) is fairly heavy, but there is also a case for the defence, and a better one than the more well-known Greek myths have yet produced. Traces of houses have been found where houses were described. Settlements are where settlements should be. Often the names of places, named after settlers who feature in the sagas, have stayed the same for the thousand or so years since they arrived. Climate data can tell us about the distribution of plants in different periods, a check on statements in the sagas and related works.
While, therefore, we don't have to take every word of the two sagas that tell of Erik's journeys literally, there's a good chance that he is a historical, as well as a mythical figure. Not every detail of his life-story will be true: it can't be, as even comparing the two sagas that describe it there are contradictions. But it's true enough that it's worth following. Definitely, someone made each of these journeys at about the time Erik is said to have lived. Probably, someone made all of them. Most likely it was Erik the Red, whose life as well as his journeys followed roughly the path described in the sagas. Even if not, though: even if Erik were the purest of fiction, the story has lived on so long in the collective imagination of the Icelandic people (and is such a good story) that it would be worth a visit for its own sake.