Baffin Island was known to the Norse Vikings as Helluland, a name given to one of three lands discovered around AD 1000 by Leif Eriksson, son of Eric the Red. The other two lands he founded were Markland and Vinland.
Helluland in North America was the first of these that he visited, and because the land was icy and inhospitable, they did not settle there.
In the Icelandic sagas (the Eirķks saga rauša and the Grnlendinga saga), Helluland was described as a land of "large flat stones" from which comes its name Helluland. It is said in the rauša; "They sailed away from Bjarneyjar with northerly winds. They were out at sea two half-days. Then they came to land, and rowed along it in boats, and explored it, and found there flat stones, many and so great that two men might well lie on them stretched on their backs with heel to heel. Polar-foxes were there in abundance. This land they gave name to, and called it Helluland."
The sagas also contain some references to viking contact with the native Dorset culture of the region, a people whom the sagas term as skręlings.
