Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/194

 makes up the 160 men, the original number of Landnammen of Vinland who embarked with Karlsefne. It would be puerile to dwell on such puerilities. To believe that Thorfinn Karlsefne, or any of his party, was acquainted not only with the Runic and Roman letters, but with the Roman numerals, yet without knowing the use of those numerals, and the number of units they express; and should leave a Runic inscription, as it is called, without a Runic letter in it, and so rude as to show—if the marks are letters at all, and not merely scratches, marks, or initials, made at various times by various hands—a complete ignorance of the collocation of letters in a. row so as to form words, and a complete ignorance of the value of the Roman numerals he was using,—would require the antiquarian credulity of a Jonathan Oldbuck.

The northern antiquaries are misled in their speculations about Yinland by the singular case of the ancient Greenland colony. By the rarest coincidence of new and old colonisation, a kind of double evidence has come out to prove the veracity of the saga accounts of that old Icelandic colony. First is the documentary evidence of the saga, bearing no inconsistency or internal evidence of deviation from truth, and supported by collateral documentary evidence, from Adam of Bremen and other writers of the 11th and 12th centuries incidentally mentioning Greenland and its bishops, and which is evidence precisely similar in kind to the documentary evidence relative to Yinland. But a second mass and kind of evidence substantiating the first has come out in our times, by the discovery in Greenland of remains of buildings, churches, and of inscriptions and other material proofs, corroborating the documentary proofs of the existence and state of this ancient colony in Greenland given in the sagas. Our modern antiquaries want to substantiate the documentary evidence of the saga relative to Vinland