Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/114

Rh the years 1305 and 1334, the date of his death, and probably during the period 1310-20. It is No. 544 of the Arne-Magnaean collection in Copenhagen. Another manuscript that tells the same story, with only verbal variations, is found in No. 557 of the same collection. This manuscript was made later than Hauk's, probably in the early part of the 15th century, but it is not a copy of Hauk's. Both were made independently from earlier manuscripts. The story as found in these two manuscripts has been pronounced by competent critics, especially Professor Gustav Storm of the university of Christiania, as the best and the most trustworthy record.

The other saga, which by chance came to be looked upon as the chief repository of facts concerning the Vinland voyages, is found in a large Icelandic work known as the Flatey Book, as it was once owned by a man who lived on Flat Island (Flatey), on the north-western coast of Iceland. This collection of sagas, completed in about 1380, is "the most extensive and most perfect of Icelandic manuscripts," and was sent to Denmark in 1662 as a gift to the king. It was evidently the general excellence of this collection that gave the version of the Vinland story that it contained precedence, in the works of early investigators, over the Vinland story of Hauk's Book. (Reeves's Finding of Wineland contains fine photographs of all the vellum pages that give the various Vinland narratives.)

According to Flatey Book saga, Biarni Henulfsson, on a voyage from Iceland to Greenland in the early days of the Greenland colony was driven out of his course and sighted new lands to the south-west. He did not go ashore (which seems strange), but sailed northward to Greenland. Fifteen years later, according to this account, Leif Ericsson set out from Greenland in search of the lands that Biarni had seen, found them and named them—Helluland (Flat-stone land), Markland (Forestland) and Vinland. After his return to Greenland, several successive expeditions visited the new lands, none of which (strangely enough) experienced any difficulty in finding Leif's hut in the distant Vinland.

According to the Vinland saga in Hauk's Book, Leif Ericsson, whose father, Eric the Red, had discovered and colonized Greenland, set out on a voyage, in 999, to visit Norway, the native land of his father. He visited the famous King Olaf Tryggvason, who reigned from 995 to 1000, and was bending his energies toward Christianizing Norway and Iceland. He immediately saw in Leif a likely aid in the conversion of the Greenlanders. Leif was converted and consented to become the king's emissary to Greenland, and the next year (1000) started on his return voyage. The saga says that he was "tossed about" on this long voyage, and came upon an unknown country, where he found "self-sown wheat fields, and vines," and also some trees called "mosur," of which he took specimens. Upon his arrival in Greenland, Leif presented the message of King Olaf, and seems to have attempted no further expeditions. But his visits to the new lands aroused much interest, and his brother Thorstein made an unsuccessful attempt to find them. Later, in 1003, an Icelander, Thorfinn Karlsefni, who was visiting the Greenland colony, and who had married Gudrid, the widow of Leif's brother Thorstein, set out with four vessels and 160 followers to found a colony in the new lands. Here they remained three years, during which time a son, Snorri, was born to Thorfinn and Gudrid. This expedition, too, found "grapes and self-sown wheat," though seemingly not in any great abundance. Concerning the southern-most region of Vinland, the saga says: "They found self-sown wheat fields in the lowlands, but vines everywhere on higher places. There were great numbers of wild animals in the woods." Then the saga relates that one morning a large number of men in skin canoes came paddling toward them and landed, staring curiously at them: "They were swarthy men and ill-looking, and the hair of their heads was ugly, they had large eyes and broad cheeks." Later the saga says: "No snow came there, and all of their live stock lived by grazing, and thrived." The natives appeared again the next spring, and a clash occurred. Fearing continued trouble with them, Karlsefni resolved to return to Greenland. This he did a year later, and spent the winter of 1006-7 there, whereupon he settled in Iceland. From him and Gudrid a number of prominent ecclesiastics claimed descent, and also Hauk Erlendsson. The Vinland story was doubtless a cherished family possession, and was put into writing, when writing sagas, instead of telling them, came into fashion. And here it is important to remember that before the age of writing in Iceland there was a saga-telling age, a most remarkable period of intellectual activity, by the aid of which the deeds and events of the seething life of the heroic age was carried over into the age of writing. "Among the medieval literature's of Europe, that of Iceland is unrivalled in the profusion of detail with which the facts of ordinary life are recorded, and the clearness with which the individual characters of numberless real persons stand out from the historic background" (Origines Islandicae). Icelandic literary history says that Ari the Learned (born in 1067) was "the first man in this land who wrote in the Norse tongue history relating to times ancient and modern." Among his works is the Book of Settlements, "a work of thorough and painstaking research unequalled in medieval literature" (Fiske). His work The Book of Icelanders is unfortunately lost, but an abridgment of it, Libellus Islandorium, made by Ari himself, contains a significant reference to Vinland. It tells that the colonists in Greenland found "both broken cayaks (canoes) and stone implements, whereby it may be seen that the same kind of folk had been there as they which inhabited Vinland, and whom the men of Greenland {i.e. the explorers) called the skrælings (i.e. inferior people)." From this allusion one cannot but think that so keen and alert a writer as Ari had given some attention to Vinland in the lost work. But of this there is no other proof. We are left to affirm, on account of definite references in various sagas and annals to Leif Ericsson and the discovery of Vinland, that the saga as preserved in Hauk's Book (and also in No. 557) rested on a strong viva voce tradition that was early put into writing by a competent hand. Dr Finnur Jonsson of Copenhagen says: "The classic form of the saga and its vivid and excellent tradition surely carry it back to about 1200." This conservative opinion does not preclude the possibility, or even probability, that written accounts of the Vinland voyages existed before this date. Vigfusson, in speaking of the sagas in general, says: "We believe that when once the first saga was written down, the others were in quick succession committed to parchment, some still keeping their form through a succession of copies, other changedThat which was not written down quickly, in due time, was lost and forgotten for ever."

The fact that there are discrepancies between the two versions as they appear in the Hauk's Book and in the Flatey Book does not justify the overthrow of both as historical evidence. The general truth of the tradition is strengthened by the fact that it has come down from two independent sources. One of them must be the better, however, and this it is the province of competent scholars to determine. The best modern scholarship gives the precedence to the Hauk's Book narrative, as it harmonizes better with well-established facts of Scandinavian history, and is besides a more plausible account. In accordance with this decision, Biarni Heriulfson's adventure should be eliminated, the priority of discovery given to Leif Ericsson, and the honour of being the first European colonists on the American continent awarded to Thorfinn Karlsefni and his followers. This was evidently the only real attempt at colonization, despite the numerous contentions to the contrary. Under date of 1121 the Icelandic annals say: "Bishop Eric of Greerland went in search of Vinland." Nothing further is recorded. The fact that his successor as bishop was appointed in 1123 would seem to indicate that the Greenlanders had information that Eric had perished.

The only important phase of the Vinland voyages that has not been definitely settled is the identifications of the regions visited by Leif and Thorfinn. The Danish antiquarian Rafn, in his monumental Antiquitates Americanae, published in 1837, and much discussed in America at that time, held for Rhode Island as Leif's landfall and the locality of Thorfinn's colony. Professor E. N. Horsford, in a number of monographs (unfortunately