Page:The Finding of Wineland the Good.djvu/70

 the lives of a crew of ship-wrecked mariners, for which he twice received the same title from the same people! In the description of the rescue, contained in the ' Short Story of the Greenlanders,' we read that the leader of the castaways was one Thori Easterling [Þórir austmaSr], whose wife, Gudrid, Thorbiorn's daughter [GuSríír Þorbjarnardóttir], seems to have been among the rescued. This Thori is mentioned nowhere save in the Flatey Book. His wife was so famous a personage in Icelandic annals that it seems passing strange this spouse should have been so completely ignored by other Icelandic chronicles, which have not failed to record Gudrid's marriage to Thorstein Ericsson, and subsequently to Thorfinn Karlsefni. Indeed, according to the biography of this ' most noble lady,' as written in the Saga of Eric the Red, there is no place for Thori, for Gudrid is said to have come to Greenland in much less romantic fashion, namely, as an unmarried woman, in the same ship with, and under the protection of her father, Thorbiorn.

Another chronological error occurs in that paragraph of the ' Short Storj' of Eric the Red,' wherein it is stated that, 'after sixteen winters had lapsed from the time when Eric the Red went to colonize Greenland, Leif, Eric's son, sailed out from Greenland to Nonvay. He arrived in Drontheim in the autumn when King Olaf Tryggvason was come down from the North out of Halogaland.' It has previously been stated in this same chronicle that Eric set out to colonize Greenland fifteen years before Christianity was legally adopted in Iceland, that is to say in the year 985. Whence it follows, from this chronology, that Leif's voyage must have been undertaken in the year looi, but since Olaf Tryggvason was killed in the autumn of the year 1000, this is, from the context, manifestly impossible. If we may suppose that the scribe of the Flatey Book, by a careless verbal substitution, wrote ' for at byggja' [went to colonize], instead of 'for at leita' [went in search of], the chronology of the narrative becomes reconcilable.

In the ' Short Story of the Greenlanders ' inaccuracies of lesser import occur, one of which, at least, appears to owe its origin to a clerical blunder. In the narrative of Freydis' voyage, we are told, that she waited upon the brothers Helgi and Finnbogi, and persuaded them to join her in an expedition to Wineland; according to the text, however, she enters into an agreement governing the manning of their ships, not with them, but with Karlsefni. Yet it is obvious, from the context, that Karlsefni did not participate in the enterprise, nor does it appear that he had any interest whatsoever in the undertaking. The substitution of Karlsefni's name for that of Helgi or Finnbogi, by a careless scribe, may have given rise to this lack of sequence. A blunder, which has crept into the genealogical list, at the conclusion of the history, ma}', perhaps, owe its origin to a somewhat similar cause. In this list, it will be noted, Bishop Thorlak [i'orlákr] is called the grandson of Hallfrid [Hallfri&r], Snorri's