For some reason, President Obama seems to have decided that the explorer Leif Erikson, who was the first European to discover the American mainland a millennium ago, was from Norway rather than his native Iceland based on the annual Leif Erikson Day proclamation on Oct. 9. To be fair, Obama has held onto the wording “son of Iceland and grandson of Norway” from his predecessors, but unlike them, he has used the opportunity to emphasize the relations between the United States and Norway instead of referring to the Nordic countries in general as has been done for decades.

If we look at the historical facts we have, mainly the Icelandic Sagas, Leif Erikson was born and grew up in Iceland. His father, Erik the Red, was a Norwegian who had emigrated to Iceland as a young man with his father. There he met Erikson’s mother, who was Icelandic. Later, Erik the Red established a Nordic settlement in Greenland. Erikson only visited Norway as a grown man. There he met with the Norwegian king. While sailing from Norway to Greenland to Christianize the settlement, Erikson and his crew drifted off course, ending up in today’s Newfoundland in Canada.