This shows how features taken from legends originally altogether different are mingled together in these sagas, in order to fill out the description; and it shows too how the same tale may take entirely different forms. Of Tyrker we hear further that “he was ‘brattleitr’ (with a flat face and abrupt forehead), had fugitive eyes, was freckled (‘smáskitligr’) in the face, small of stature and puny, but skilful in all kinds of dexterity.” Thorhall, on the other hand, “was tall of stature, dark and troll-like,” etc. (see p. 320), but he was also master of many crafts, was well acquainted with the uninhabited regions, and altogether had qualities different from most people. Both had long been with Eric the Red. There can scarcely be a doubt that these two legendary figures, perhaps originally derived from wholly different spheres, have been blended together.

The whale that is driven ashore and that they feed on resembles the great fish that is cast ashore and that the Irish saint Brandan and his companions live on in the tale of his wonderful voyage (see below). This resemblance is confirmed by the statement in the Icelandic story that no one knew what kind of whale it was, not even Karlsevne, who had great experience of whales. There are, of course, no whales on the north-eastern coast of America that are not also found on the coasts of Greenland and Iceland; the incident therefore appears fictitious. The great whale in the legend of Brandan, on the other hand, is a fabulous monster. There is this distinction, it is true, that Karlsevne’s people fall ill from eating the whale,[324] while it saves the lives of the Irish voyagers; but in both cases it is driven ashore after God, or a god, has been invoked in their need, and disappears again immediately (in the tale of Brandan it is devoured by wild beasts; in the saga it is thrown over the cliff). This difference can easily be explained by the whale in the Norse story having been sent by a heathen god, so that it was sacrilege to eat of it. In the tale of Brandan the whale is perhaps derived from Oriental legends [cf. De Goeje, 1891, p. 63]; it may, however, be a common northern feature.

When it is stated of Straumsfjord that there were places where eggs could be gathered, and of Straumsey that “there were so many birds that one could scarcely put one’s foot down between the eggs,” this is evidently an entirely northern feature, brought in to decorate the tale, and brought in so infelicitously that they are made to find all this mass of eggs there in the autumn (!) when they arrive. If Straumsfjord was in Nova Scotia there could not be eider-ducks nor gulls either[325] in sufficient number to form breeding-grounds of importance, and among sea-birds one would be more inclined to think of terns, as Professor R. Collett has suggested to me. As the coast is not described as one with steep cliffs, and there is mention of stepping between the eggs, auks, guillemots and similar sea-birds are out of the question, even if they occurred so far south.

But then comes the most important part of the saga, the description of the country itself, where grew self-sown fields of wheat, and vines on the hills, where no snow fell and the cattle were out the whole winter, where the streams and the sea teemed with fish and the woods were full of deer.

Isidore says [in the “Etymologiarum,” xiv. 6, 8] of the Fortunate Isles:

These ideas of the Fortunate Isles were widely current in the Middle Ages. In the English work, “Polychronicon,” by Ranulph Higden, of the fourteenth century, Isidore’s description took the following form:

The resemblance between this description and that of Wineland is so close that it cannot be explained away as fortuitous; the most prominent features are common to both: the self-sown cornfields, the self-grown vines on the hills, and the lofty trees (cf. Pliny, below, p. 348), which are already present in the narrative of Leif’s voyage (see above, p. 317). If we go back to antiquity and examine the general ideas of the Fortunate Land or the Fortunate Isles out in the ocean in the west, we find yet more points of resemblance. Diodorus [v. 19, 20] describes a land opposite Africa, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, as fertile and mountainous, but also to a large extent flat. (Wineland also had hills and lowlands.) It invites to amusements and delights.[326] The mountainous country has thick forests and all kinds of fruitful trees, and many streams; there is excellent hunting with game of all sorts, big and small, and the sea is full of fish (precisely as Wineland). Moreover, the air is extremely mild (as in Wineland), and there is plenty of fruit the whole year round, etc. The land was not known in former times, but some Phœnicians on a voyage along the African coast were overtaken by a storm, were driven about the ocean for many days, until they came thither (like Leif).

It is said of Wineland, in the Saga of Eric the Red, that “no snow at all fell there, and the cattle were out (in winter) and fed themselves,” and in the Flateyjarbók we read that “there was no frost in the winter, and the grass withered little.” These, we see, are pure impossibilities. As early as the Odyssey [iv. 566] it is said of the Elysian Fields in the west on the borders of the earth:

“There is never snow, never winter nor storm, nor streaming rain,
But Ocean ever sends forth the light breath of the west wind
To bring refreshment to men.”

In the early civilisation of Babylon and Egypt this fortunate land seems to have been imagined as lying in the direction of the rising sun; but the ideas are always the same. An ancient Egyptian myth puts “Aalu” or “Hotep” (== place of food, land of eating), which is the abode of bliss and fortune, far in the east, where light conquers darkness.

In the same colours as these the Odyssey describes many fortunate lands and islands, such as the nymph Calypso’s beautiful island Ogygia, far in the west of the ocean; and again “Scheria’s delightful island” [vii. 79 ff.], where the Phæacians, “a people as happy as gods,” dwell “far away amid the splashing waves of the ocean,” where the mild west wind, both winter and summer, ever causes the fruit-trees and vines to blossom and bear fruit, and where all kinds of herbs grow all the year round (remark the similarity with Isidore’s description). The fortunate isle of Syria, far in the western ocean, is also mentioned [xv. 402],

“North of Ortygia, towards the region where the sun sets;
Rich in oxen and sheep, and clothed with vines and wheat,”

where the people live free from want and sickness. These are the same ideas which were afterwards transferred to the legend of the Hyperboreans (cf. pp. 15 ff.).[328] It is natural that among the Greeks wine and the vine took a prominent place in these descriptions. In post-Homeric times the “Isles of the Blest” (Μακάρων νῆσοι) are described by Hesiod (and subsequently by Pindar) as lying in the western ocean—

It is these ideas—perhaps originally derived from the Orient—that have developed into the Insulæ Fortunatæ.

These islands are described by many writers of later antiquity. Pliny says [Nat. Hist., vi. 32 (37)] that according to some authors there lie to the west of Africa

But as usual Pliny uncritically confuses statements from various sources, and he here adds information collected by the African king Juba about the Fortunate Isles. According to this they were six in number: Ombrios, two islands of Junonia, besides Capraria, Nivaria, and Canaria, so called from the many large dogs there, of which two were brought to Juba. Solinus mentions in one place [c. 23, 10] that there are three Fortunatæ Insulæ, but in another place [c. 56] he gives Juba’s statement from Pliny. That these islands were located to the west of Africa is certainly due to the Phœnicians’ and Carthaginians’ knowledge of the Canary Islands, and Ptolemy also places them here (see above, p. 117). Strabo [i. 3] thinks that the Isles of the Blest lay west of the extremity of Maurusia (Morocco), in the region where the ends of Maurusia and Iberia meet. Their name shows that they lie near to the holy region (i.e., the Elysian Fields).

In his biography of the eminent Roman general Sertorius (“imperator” in Spain for several years, died in 72 B.C.), Plutarch also mentions the Isles of the Blest. He tells us that when Sertorius landed as an exile on the south-west coast of Spain (Andalusia),

But this remarkable man soon had fresh warlike under-takings to think about, so that he never went there. It appears too from the fragments that have come down to us of Sallust’s Histories[329] that Sertorius did not visit these islands, but only wished to do so. In fragment 102 we read:

But in L. Annæus Florus, who lived under Hadrian (117-138 A.D.), we read [iii. 22]:[330]

It thus appears that by Florus’s time the idea had shaped itself that Sertorius really had sought and found these islands; which, besides, in part at all events, were thought to be the same as those said to have been already discovered by the Carthaginian Hanno on the west coast of Africa about 500 B.C.

Of great interest is the description which Horace gives in his Epodes [xvi. 39 ff.] of the Fortunate Isles in the ocean, though he does not mention them by name. He exhorts the Romans, who were suffering from the civil wars, to abandon the coast of Italy (the Etruscan coast) and sail thither, away from all their miseries. Lord Lytton[331] gave the following metrical translation of the poem:

Ye in whom manhood lives, cease woman wailings,
Wing the sail far beyond Etruscan shores.
Lo! where awaits an all-circumfluent ocean—
Fields, the Blest Fields we seek, the Golden Isles
Where teems a land that never knows the ploughshare—
Where, never needing pruner, laughs the vine—
Where the dusk fig adorns the stem it springs from,
And the glad olive ne’er its pledge belies—
There from the creviced ilex wells the honey;
There, down the hillside bounding light, the rills
Dance with free foot, whose fall is heard in music;
There, without call, the she-goat yields her milk,
And back to browse, with unexhausted udders,
Wanders the friendly flock; no hungry bear
Growls round the sheepfold in the starry gloaming,
Nor high with rippling vipers heaves the soil.
These, and yet more of marvel, shall we witness,
We, for felicity reserved; how ne’er
Dark Eurus sweeps the fields with flooding rain-storm,
Nor rich seeds parch within the sweltering glebe.
Either extreme the King of Heaven has tempered.
Thither ne’er rowed the oar of Argonaut,
The impure Colchian never there had footing.
There Sidon’s trader brought no lust of gain;
No weary toil there anchored with Ulysses;
Sickness is known not; on the tender lamb
No ray falls baneful from one star in heaven.
When Jove’s decree alloyed the golden age,
He kept these shores for one pure race secreted;
For all beside the golden age grew brass
Till the last centuries hardened to the iron,
Whence to the pure in heart a glad escape,
By favour of my prophet-strain is given.

Rendered into prose, Horace’s poem will run somewhat as follows:

We thus find here in Horace precisely the same ideas of the Elysian Fields or the Fortunate Isles that occur later in Isidore and in the saga’s description of the fortunate Wineland; especially striking are the expressions about the corn that each year grows wild (on the unploughed earth) and the wild vine which continually yields fruit (blossoms, “floret”).

To sum up, it appears to me clear that the saga’s description of Wineland must in its essential features be derived from the myth of the Insulæ Fortunatæ. The representations of it might be taken directly from Isidore, who was much read in the Middle Ages, certainly in Iceland (where a partial translation of his work was made) and in Norway (he is often quoted in the “King’s Mirror”), or orally from other old authorities, who gave still more detailed descriptions of these islands. But the difficulty is that the name of Wineland, connected with the ideas of the self-grown vine and the unsown wheat, is already found in Adam of Bremen (circa 1070, see above, pp. 195 ff.). We might therefore suppose that it was his mention of the country which formed the basis of the Icelandic representation of it, although his fourth book (the description of the isles of the North) seems otherwise to have been little known in the North at that time; but here again the difficulty presents itself that the later description, that of the saga, is more developed and includes several features which agree with the classical conceptions, but which are not yet found in Adam of Bremen. I think therefore that the matter may stand thus, that “Vínland hit Góða” was the Norsemen’s name for “Insulæ Fortunatæ,” and was in a way a translation thereof; and oral tales about the country—based on Isidore and later on other sources as well—may have formed the foundation of the statements both in Adam and in Icelandic literature. In the latter, then, an ever-increasing number of features from the classical conceptions have crystallised upon the nucleus, when once it was formed, especially through the clerical, classically educated saga-writers.

As Norway, and still more Iceland (cf. pp. 167, 258), were closely connected in ancient days with Ireland, and as Norse literature in many ways shows traces of Irish influence, one is disposed to think that the ideas of Wineland may first have reached Iceland from that quarter. This exactly agrees with what was said at the beginning of this chapter, that the statements (in the Landnámabók) from the oldest Icelandic source, Are Frode, point directly to Ireland as the birthplace of the first reports of Wineland. We read in the Landnámabók:

Nothing more is said about Wineland.[334] As it is added that Are Mársson’s voyage to Hvítramanna-land

we see that Ravn, who was an Icelandic sailor of the beginning of the eleventh century, must have heard of both Hvítramanna-land and Wineland in Ireland, since otherwise he could not have known that one lay near the other.[335] But as Hvítramanna-land or “Great Ireland” is an Irish mythical country (see later), it becomes probable that Wineland the Good, at any rate in this connection, was one likewise. The old Irish legends mention many such fortunate islands in the western ocean, which have similar names, and which to a large extent are derived from the classical myths of the Elysian Fields and the Insulæ Fortunatæ. Voyages to them form prominent features of most of the Irish tales and legends. In the heathen tale of the Voyage of Bran (“Echtra Brain maic Febail,” preserved in fifteenth and fourteenth century copies of a work of the eleventh century, but perhaps originally written down in the seventh century)[336] there are descriptions of: “Emain” or “Tír na-m-Ban” (the land of women), with thousands of amorous women and maidens, and “without care, without death, without any sickness or infirmity” (where Bran and his men live sumptuously each with his woman);[337] “Aircthech” (== the beautiful land); “Ciuin” (== the mild land), with riches and treasures of all colours, where one listens to lovely music, and drinks the most delicious wine; “Mag Mon” (== the plain of sports); “Imchiuin” (== the very mild land); “Mag Mell” (== the happy plain, the Elysium of the Irish), which is described as lying beneath the sea, where without sin, without crime, men and loving women sit under a bush at the finest sports, with the noblest wine, where there is a splendid wood with flowers and fruits and golden leaves, and the true scent of the vine; there is also “Inis Subai” (the isle of gladness), where all the people do nothing but laugh.[338] It is said in the same tale that “there are thrice fifty distant islands in the ocean to the west of us, each of them twice or thrice as large as Erin.”

That western happy lands in the Irish legends (even in the Christian “Imram Maelduin”) should often be depicted as the Land of Women (“Tír na-m-Ban”) or Land of Virgins (“Tír na-n-Ingen”), with amorously longing women, might be thought to have some connection with Mahomet’s Paradise and the Houris; but the erotically sensuous element is everywhere so prominent in mediæval Irish literature that this feature may be a genuine Irish one.[339] It must, by the way, be this “Tír na-n-Ingen” that we meet with again in the Faroese lay “Gongu-Rólv’s kvæði,” where the giant from Trollebotten carries Rolv to “Möyaland” (cf. Småmöyaland); there Rolv slept three nights with the fair “Lindin mjá” (== the slender lime-tree, i.e., maid), and on the third night she lost her virginity. But the other maidens all want to see him, they all want to torment him, some want to throw him into the sea,

She sends for the bird “Skúgv,” which carries him on its back for seven days and six nights across the sea to the highest mountain in Trondhjem. [Cf. Hammershaimb, 1855, pp. 138 ff.]

From a MS. of the thirteenth century (Royal Library, Copenhagen)

The “Promised Land” (“Tír Tairngiri”) with the “Happy Plain” (“Mag Mell”)[340] became in the Christian Irish legends the earthly Paradise, “Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum” (the land of promise of the saints). Other names for the happy land or happy isles in the west are: “Hy Breasail” (== the fortunate isle), “Tír na-m-Beo” (== the land of the living), “Tír na-n-Óg” (== the land of youth), “Tír na-m-Buadha” (== the land of virtues), “Hy na-Beatha” (== the isle of life). The happy isle of “Hy Breasail,” which was thought to be inhabited by living people, was also frequently called the “Great Land” (which when translated into Old Norse might become “Víðland”); just as the “Land of the Living,” where there were only enticing women and maidens, and neither death nor sin nor offence, was called the “Great Strand” (“Trág Mór”).[341] There is also mention of “Tír n-Ingnad” (land of marvels) and “Tírib Ingnad” (lands of marvels). This Irish series of names and conceptions for the same wonderful land (or strand) may well be thought to have been the origin of the name “Furðustrandir.”[342] The Irish often imagined their Promised Land, with “Mag Mell” and also the land of women, as the sunken land under the sea (cf. p. 355), and called it “Tír fo-Thuin” (== the land under the wave).

It is not surprising that a name like “Vínland hit Góða” should have developed from such a world of ideas as this. But Moltke Moe has drawn my attention to yet another remarkable agreement, in the Grape-Island (“Insula Uvarum”), one of the fortunate isles visited by the Irish saint Brandan. In the Latin “Navigatio Sancti Brandani”—a description of Brandan’s seven years’ sea voyage in search of the “Promised Land”—it is related that one day a mighty bird came flying to Brandan and the brethren who were with him in the coracle; it had a branch in its beak with a bunch of grapes of unexampled size and redness[343] [cf. Numbers xiii. 23],[344] and it dropped the branch into the lap of the man of God. The grapes were as large as apples, and they lived on them for twelve days.

Then this man of God goes ashore and explores the island, while the brethren wait in the boat (like Karlsevne and his men waiting for the runners), until he comes back to them bringing samples of the fruits of the island (as the runners brought with them samples of the products of Wineland). He says: “Come ashore and set up the tent, and regale yourselves with the excellent fruits of this land, which the Lord has shown us.” For forty days they lived well on the grapes, and when they left they loaded the boat with as many of them as it would hold, exactly like Leif in the “Grönlendinga-þáttr,” who loaded the ship’s boat with grapes when they left Wineland; and like Thorvald at the same place, who collected grapes and vines for a cargo [cf. “Grönl. hist. Mind.,” i. pp. 222, 230].

The fortunate island on which the monk Mernoc lived (at the beginning of the “Navigatio”) was called “Insula Deliciosa.” The great river that Brandan found in the Terra Repromissionis, and that ran through the middle of the island, may be compared to the stream that Karlsevne found at Hóp in Wineland, which fell into a lake and thence into the sea, and where they entered the mouth of the river. But the river which divided the Terra Repromissionis, and which Brandan could not cross, was evidently originally the river of death, Styx or Acheron in Greek mythology (“Gjǫll” in Norse mythology). One might be tempted to suppose that, in the same way as the whole description of Wineland has been dechristianised from the Terra Repromissionis, the realistic, and therefore often rationalising, Icelanders have transformed the river in the Promised Land, the ancient river of death, into the stream at Hóp.

Other passages also of the descriptions of the Wineland voyages present similarities with Brandan’s voyage; and similar resemblances are found with other Irish legends, so many, in fact, that they cannot be explained as coincidences. The “Navigatio Sancti Brandani” was written in the eleventh century, or in any case before 1100[345] (but parts of the legend of Brandan may belong to the seventh and eighth centuries). The work was widely diffused in Europe in the twelfth century, and was also well known in Iceland; we still possess an Old Norse translation of parts of it in the “Heilagra Manna sǫgur” [edited by Unger, Christiania, 1877, i.]. Through oral narratives the mythical features which are included in this legend have evidently helped to form the tradition of the Wineland voyages.

In the tale of the voyage of Maelduin and his companions (“Imram Maelduin,” see above, p. 336),[346] it is related that they came to an island where there were many trees, like willow or hazel, with wonderful fruit like apples, or wine-fruit, with a thick, large shell; its juice had so intoxicating an effect that Maelduin slept for a day and a night after having drunk it; and when he awoke, he told his companions to collect as much as they could of it, for the world had never produced anything so lovely. They then filled all their vessels with the juice, which they pressed out of the fruit, and left the island. They mixed the juice with water to mitigate its intoxicating and soporific effect, as it was so powerful.[347] This reminds us of Tyrker in the “Grönlendinga-þáttr,” who gets drunk from eating the grapes he found.[348]

That a mythical island like the Isle of Grapes—or perhaps others as well, such as the “Insula Deliciosa”—might be the origin of the “Vinland hit Góða” of the Icelanders, to which one sailed from Greenland (and of Adam of Bremen’s Winland), appears natural also from the fact that many of the islands and tracts that are mentioned in the “Navigatio,” and that for the most part are also mentioned in the older tale of Maelduin, are undoubtedly connected with northern and western waters. That this must be so is easily understood when one considers the voyages of Irish monks to the Faroes and Iceland. The Sheep Island, which was full of sheep, and where Brandan obtained his paschal lamb, must be the Faroes, where the sheep are mentioned even by Dicuil (see p. 163), just as the island with the many birds also reminds us of Dicuil’s account of these islands; the island on the borders of Hell, whose steep cliffs were black as coal, where one of Brandan’s monks, when he set foot ashore, was instantly seized and burnt by demons, and which at their departure they saw covered with fire and flames, may have some connection with Iceland.[349] But it also bears some resemblance to the Hell Island that Lucian’s voyagers come to, surrounded by steep cliffs, where there were stinking fumes of asphalt, sulphur, pitch, and roasted human beings. When Brandan arrives at the curdled sea (“mare quasi coagulatum”), and has to sail through darkness before he comes to the Land of Happiness, or when we hear of a thick fog like a wall about the kingdom of Manannan, we again think of the northern regions where the Liver Sea lay, and where Adam of Bremen had his dark or mist-filled sea.