Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/69

Rh appeared to others, that he is very successful in proving his case. To believe this, does not, of course, imply a belief in his infallibility.

Crossing the Atlantic, we find similar evidence in North America. According to the "Algonquin Legends of New England," as these have been collected by Mr. C. G. Leland, the region which embraces Maine, Nova Scotia, and Eastern Canada was inhabited by "little men," "dwellers in rocks," at a time when there were, as yet, no red Indians in that territory—"only wild Indians very far to the West." The date of arrival of the Beothuks in Newfoundland, and of the Algonquins in the St. Lawrence region, is only of minor importance in the present question. And yet it can be approximately fixed by means of these same "little men, dwellers in rocks," who preceded them. Because, when the Norsemen first landed on the northeastern coast of North America, in the beginning of the eleventh century, the red Indians had not, as yet, appeared upon the scene. The chief Norse accounts of those landings are so well known, having been before the world ever since the publication of Rafn's Antiquitates Americanæ in 1837, that it is unnecessary to do more than to refer very briefly to the description there given of the people whom the explorers encountered. They seem to have been most frequently styled "Skroelings," a word which "Rafn" renders by Homunculi, i. e., "little men."

An equivalent translation is that given by Claus Magnus in the 16th century, at which period his map shows that the eastern part of Greenland was inhabited by "pigmies" commonly called "Skroelings." Rafn's remark that the descriptions of the 11th century "Skroelings" of the New England coast coincide with the accounts given of modern Greenlanders or Lokimoes, is not only fully justified by those descriptions, but it is still further corroborated by the statement of Claus Magnus that the people of Eastern Greenland in the 16th century were "Skroelings." And this word he also regards as a synonym for a "dwarf." For all these reasons, then, we find that the Norse records fully bear out the traditions of the Algonquins that their