Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/185

 founded on the number of days' sailing from Hellaland to Markland, or from Markland to Yinland, is quite arbitrary, and without guide. The description of the land is equally unsatisfactory as a means of discovering the localities in Yinland they visited, without more precise data. A country of stony soil, with little vegetation among the slaty fragments that cover it, applies to all the country from Hudson's Bay to Newfoundland; and Hellaland, so called from this circumstance, is a name that would suit any part of Labrador as well as Newfoundland. Markland, so called because low or level, and covered with thick forests, as a description may be applied to any part of America as well as to Nova Scotia. An island with a sound between it and the main, or a low shore with remarkably white sand cliffs and shallow water, a fiord or inlet of the sea, a river running out of a lake, a bay between two headlands, one of them of a conspicuous figure, are good landmarks for identifying a country of which the position is known, but are good for nothing as data for fixing that po¬ sition itself; because these are features common to all sea coasts, and, on a small or great scale, to be found within every hundred miles of a run along the sea¬ board of a country. It is evident from the personal adventures ascribed by the saga-maker to the person¬ ages, that the details are imaginary, and only the ge¬ neral outline true. The revival of Thorstein Ericson's body, and its prophesying what was to befal Gudrid in her lifetime, are within the ordinary belief of those times, and therefore do not lessen the confidence in other circumstances related; nor the appearance to her alone of another Gudrid, who spoke Norse to her in Yinland, and whom nobody else saw. But the adventures of Freydisa, her murder of the two brothers, thirty men, and the women, is an improbable, not to say an impossible circumstance; as her