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108 GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND On the other hand, the belligerent spirit which kept up the bloody feuds of Iceland would not quickly have lapsed from these transplanted Icelanders in their new home. Moreover, there were thralls among them and the irritations growing out of thralldom. Also, while much of their daily routine was quiet enough, they were subject to savage weather and perils of navigation, of the fisheries, of hunting far up the coast, where many of them maintained stations for that purpose at Krog- fiordsheath and other points. Even in getting to Greenland Eric was able to carry through only about half of the ships that sailed with him, and Gudrid and Thorbiorn, coming later, incurred ample experiences of storm and danger. These wild elements of life would tend to enhance a certain recklessness; and the law must have been impotent to maintain order in remote fiords and headlands, even if it had sought to do so. In the Floamanna Saga, dealing with events not long after the very first settlement, the thralls of Thorgils murder his young wife on the eastern coast, where they had all been cast ashore together. In another of the Greenland tales there is a bloody contention, freely involving homicide, over the claims of the church upon the contents of two ships which had come to grief. No doubt such instances might be multiplied; but in the main we may believe that the lives of the Greenlanders went orderly enough in common grooves of very primitive husbandry and fishing. Adam may have judged by reports of visitors with a grievance, narrated at second or third hand. If Greenland had a long history, it was that of a few people in a remote region and could not present many salient features. The colony possessed at least one monastery and the beginning of a literature, including, it is said, the Lay of Atli, revealing a curious interest in the career of the great Hun Attila, on the part of a distant colonist hidden in Arctic mists and writing beside the glaciers. In art, as distinguished from literature, they seem to have made few advances, if any, beyond mere ornamental carving or designing on a plane hardly surpassing that of the Eskimos.