It has been said that even if such warlike proceedings would be entirely incompatible with the present nature, disposition and way of thinking of the Greenland Eskimo, it may formerly have been otherwise. But in any case no long time can have elapsed between the alleged final overthrow of the Eastern Settlement, perhaps about 1500, and the rediscovery of Greenland in the sixteenth century. It is not likely that the Eskimo should have so completely changed their nature in the few intervening years; those whom the discoverers then found seem, from the accounts, to have strikingly resembled those we find later. And if one reads Hans Egede’s description of the Eskimo among whom he lived and worked, it appears absolutely impossible that the same people two hundred years earlier should have waged a cruel war of extermination against the last of the Norsemen.

There is, it is true, a possibility, as Dr. Björnbo has pointed out to me, that the mixture of race which gradually took place between Eskimo and Norsemen may for a time have produced a mixed type, which possessed a more quarrelsome disposition than the pure Eskimo, and may have inherited the not very peaceful habits of the Norsemen, and that in this way, for instance, a possible attack in 1379 may be explained. But this can only have been the case at the beginning of the period of intermixture, and the type must have changed again in proportion as the Eskimo element in race and culture became preponderant.[87]

The allusion to the Pygmies of Greenland in the letter to Nicholas V., quoted above (p. 86), gives us the Eskimo as we are accustomed to see them; and the description of these small men, a cubit high, who fly in a body at the sight of strangers, gives a surer and truer picture of the Skrælings than when they are represented as warlike and dangerous barbarians. The statements about the Pygmies in Claudius Clavus also enable us to see how the Norsemen sometimes treated the Eskimo, when they caught them

But that these little Pygmies, a cubit high, were regarded as formidable warriors, engaged in exterminating the Norsemen, is difficult to believe,[88] even though Michel Beheim attributes warlike qualities to them (cf. p. 85). Walkendorf, who had so carefully collected all traditions about Greenland, describes (circa 1520) the Skrælings as an “unwarlike” and harmless people (see above, p. 86). It is impossible to reconcile this with a tradition of a war of extermination.

There are therefore good grounds for supposing that Arne Magnussen was approximately correct when he said in 1691 [Grönl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 138]:

In the year 1406 the Icelanders Thorstein Helmingsson, Snorre Thorvason and Thorgrim Solvason, in one ship, were driven out of their course to Greenland. “They sailed out from Norway, and were making for Iceland. They stayed there [in Greenland] four winters” [cf. Islandske Annaler, ed. Storm, 1888, p. 288]. While they were there, in the following year [1407]

In 1408 one of the Icelanders married in Greenland, which is of interest from the fact that several documents bearing witness to the marriage are extant. In 1410 “Thorstein Helmingsson and Thorgrim Solvason and Snorre Thorvason and the rest of their crew sailed to Norway.” Whether this was in their own ship we do not know; but as they sailed to Norway and not to Iceland it is doubtless most probable that their ship was destroyed and that they had to wait these four years for a passage to Norway. In 1411[89] a small vessel was wrecked on the coast of Iceland; on board her came Snorre Thorvason from Norway. His wife, Gudrun, had during his absence married another man in 1410. She “now rode to meet him. He received her kindly.” “Snorre took his wife to him again, but they only lived a little while together before he died, and she then married Gisle [the other man] again.”

This is the last certain information we have of any voyage to the ancient settlements of Greenland. After that time all notices cease. As Holberg says [Danm. Hist., i. 531], after the time of Queen Margaret the succeeding kings had so much to do that they had no time to think of old Greenland.[90]

In 1431 King Eric of Pomerania complained to the English king, Henry VI., of the illegal trading which the English had carried on for the previous twenty years (that is, since 1411) with “Norway’s Lands and Islands”: Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, Shetland, the Orkneys, Helgeland and Finmark; and of the acts of violence and piratical incursions, with fire and rapine, that they had committed in this period, by which they had carried off many ships laden with fish and other goods, and many people had perished.[91] As early as 1413 King Eric’s ambassador to the English king, Henry V., had made a strong protest against all foreign and unprivileged trade with these countries. On Christmas Eve, 1432, a treaty was signed between the two kings, whereby Henry VI. engaged himself to make good all the damage the English had caused to King Eric’s subjects in the said countries, and all the people who during those twenty years had been violently carried off were, by the direction of the English king, wherever they might be found in his dominions, to receive payment for their services and to return freely to their native places. Further, the old prohibition of trading with the Norwegian tributary lands was renewed. The same prohibition was renewed and enforced on the English side by Henry VI. in 1444, and by a new treaty between him and Christiern I., concluded at Copenhagen, July 17, 1449; but this was only to remain in force till Michaelmas 1451. After that time the English merchants, some of whom no doubt were Norwegians established at Bristol, seem to have seized upon nearly the whole of the trade with Iceland, and often conducted themselves with violence there. But in 1490 this trade was made free on certain conditions.

These negotiations give us an insight into the state of things in Northern waters at that time. At the same time there were difficulties with the Hanseatic League, which tried to seize upon all trade.

Among these so-called Norwegian tributary countries was Greenland, which is mentioned with the others in the complaint of 1431; but whether this means that the English extended their trading voyages, which frequently became piratical expeditions, so far, we do not know; in any case it is not impossible, although of course the voyage to Iceland with its rich fisheries was much more important. We know that this was carried on from Bristol in particular, where, as has been said, many Norwegians were established.

The statements about Greenland contained in the papal letter of 1448 were, as we have seen, false. Perhaps not very much more weight is to be attached to the story, in Peyrere’s “Relation du Groënland” (Paris, 1647), of Oluf Worm of Copenhagen having found in an old Danish MS. a statement that about 1484 there were more than forty experienced men living at Bergen, who were in the habit of sailing to Greenland every year and bringing home valuable goods; but as they would not sell their wares to the Hanse merchants, the latter revenged themselves by inviting them to a supper and killing them all at night. This then was said to be the end of the Greenland voyage, which had to cease thenceforward, because no one knew the course any more [cf. Grönl hist. Mind., iii. pp. 471, f.]. The story as given here is in many respects improbable; but even if the forty or more men and the annual voyage are exaggerations, there are other indications that about that time there may have been some sort of communication with Greenland or the countries to the west of it, as will be mentioned later. The royal monopoly of the Iceland trade was no longer in force, and the same may have applied to Greenland. It is then conceivable that merchants may have gone there; and if their trading prospered they had every reason to keep it as secret as possible, lest others should interfere with their livelihood. This would explain why such voyages are not mentioned by historical authorities. Just then, too, was an uneasy time, with a sort of war of privateers between England and Denmark-Norway, which was not concluded until the provisional peace of 1490; there were thus many pirates and privateers in Northern waters, who may well have extended their activity upon occasion to the remote and unprotected Greenland, where they could plunder with even greater impunity than in Iceland, and perhaps they increased the ruin of the settlements there.

Of great interest is a letter from Pope Alexander VI.[92] of the first year of his papacy, 1492-1493, which was written in consequence of a Benedictine monk named Mathias having applied to the Pope to be appointed bishop of Greenland, and declared himself willing to go there personally as a missionary to convert the apostates. The letter runs:

The statements in the letter agree remarkably well with what we gather from other historical sources. In 1410—that is, eighty-two years before the date of the letter—the last ship of which we have any notice arrived in Norway from Greenland (see above, p. 118). This agrees with the statement in the letter that no ship had been there for eighty years. In 1377 the last officiating bishop of Gardar died, and six years later the news reached Norway, that is, 109 years before the date of the letter. This agrees with what is said about the altar-cloth being used a hundred years before by the last priest (“ultimo sacerdote,” perhaps meaning here bishop ?) at the administration of the sacrament. The assertion that it was not until August that Greenland became free of ice and that voyages could be made thither also shows a certain local knowledge; for it was not till late in the summer, usually August, that “Knarren” was accustomed to sail from Bergen to Greenland.

A portion of Gourmont’s map of 1548, with the north-west coast of Iceland and the rocky island of Hvitserk

Whether news had recently arrived from Greenland at the time the letter was written does not appear from the words of the letter, and cannot, in my opinion, be inferred therefrom, though Storm [1892, p. 401] thought it could. The only thing which might point to this is the story of the altar-cloth being exhibited once a year; but this, of course, may be a tradition which goes back to the last ship, eighty years before.

Meanwhile we meet with obscure information in other quarters about a possible communication with Greenland at that time. In a map of Iceland, printed in Paris in 1548 by Hieronymus Gourmont,[93] a rocky island is marked to the north-west of Iceland, with a compass-card and a Latin inscription. This, as A. A. Björnbo has pointed out,[94] is of interest; it reads in translation:

The rock Hvitserk, and a fight with a Greenland Pygmy (Olaus Magnus, 1557)

The map is a modified copy of Olaus Magnus’s well-known large chart of 1539, on which the island with the compass-card is found, but not the inscription.

It is possibly a fuller version or adaptation of the substance of this inscription, or of the source from which it is taken, that is met with again in Olaus Magnus’s work on the Northern peoples, of 1555, where he says of “the lofty mountain ‘Huitsark,’ which lies in the middle of the sea between Iceland and Greenland”:

It may be the expression “piratæ,” which might be used both of an ordinary pirate and of a privateer or freebooter, which misled Olaus Magnus into constructing this wonderful story. The mere fact that, both in his map of 1539 and in his work of 1555, he makes Hvitserk, which of course was in Greenland, into a rocky island out at sea between Greenland and Iceland, where no island is to be found, is enough to shake one’s belief in the trustworthiness of this strange report. His incomprehensible story of the compass constructed there does not make things any better. G. Storm [1886, p. 395] thought it might have come about in this way: that Olaus Magnus, who was no great sailor or geographer, read on a chart a note about Pining’s voyage to Greenland, and saw in its proximity the name Hvitserk and a compass-card in the middle of the sea; and then, without understanding its real meaning, he made it an island and gave it his own explanation. Björnbo and Petersen [1909, pp. 250, 251] have, it is true, pointed out that something of the same sort is told of the North Cape by Sivert Grubbe, who accompanied Christian IV. on his voyage to Finmark, and who writes in his journal (in Latin) on May 12, 1599: “We sailed past the North Cape. On the top of this mountain is a compass cut into the rock.” But as they “sailed past,” Grubbe cannot have been up and seen this compass; it may therefore be supposed that a similar error is at the base of this improbable statement; it is difficult to see what value for mariners such a compass could have. But notwithstanding Olaus Magnus’s fantastic story, Pining and Pothorst may really have been in Greenland. The former must be the Norwegian nobleman Didrik Pining, who together with Pothorst (“Pytchehorsius”) is said to have distinguished himself during the later years of Christiern I., “not less as capable seamen than as matchless freebooters” (piratæ). He was much employed by Christiern I. and King Hans against the English and sometimes against the Hanseatic League, and is mentioned by several historical authorities.[95] He seems also to have extended his activity upon occasion to the Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, for about 1484 he captured, off the English coast or off Brittany and in the Spanish Sea, three Spanish or Portuguese ships, and brought them to the king at Copenhagen. In a treaty which was concluded in 1490 between King Hans and the Dutch it is expressly stipulated that Didrik Pinning and a certain Busch were to be excluded from the peace. Didrik Pining is spoken of as lord over Iceland, or perhaps over the eastern and southern part, in 1478; but on the death of Christiern I. in 1481, another was appointed as “hirdstjore” (or stadtholder), and it is stated in the letter of appointment, issued by the council at Bergen in 1481, that Pining had “gone out of Iceland”; but a few years later he is again mentioned as hirdstjore there. When in 1487 King Hans took possession of Gotland, Pining accompanied him thither, doubtless as commander of the Danish-Norwegian squadron; he is called “Skipper Pining,” which corresponds to commodore or admiral in our time (cf. Christiern I.’s “Skipper Clemens”). In July 1489 Didrik Pining was among the Norwegian noblemen who paid homage at Copenhagen to the king’s son, Christiern (II.) as heir to the kingdom of Norway; and in August and September 1490 he took part in the settlement of a suit concerning a large inheritance at Bergen; but in two Icelandic laws or edicts of that time, 1489 and 1490, the so-called “Pining’s Laws,” he is described as “‘hirdstjore’ over the whole of Iceland,” and a later chronicler speaks of him as one of the most famous men in Iceland, and he says that “he was in many ways a serviceable man and put many things right that were wrong.” It must be the same Didrik Pining who was appointed in 1490 governor of Vardöhus, and it may be supposed that he was commander-in-chief on sea and land in northern waters.

We hear of Pining, and his associate Pothorst, in an old (Icelandic ?) report which, together with Ivar Bárdsson’s description of Greenland, was found in an old book of accounts in the Faroes, and which in an English translation was included in “Purchas his Pilgrimes” (London, 1625, vol. iii.), where we read:

As this last statement agrees with the two “Pining’s Laws” mentioned above, there may also be some truth in the voyages to Greenland. An unexpected confirmation of this recently came to light in the discovery of a document by Louis Bobé [1909] at Copenhagen; it is a letter, dated March 3, 1551, from Burgomaster Carsten Grip, of Kiel, to King Christiern III. Grip was, as we are told in the letter, the king’s commissioner for the purchase of books, paintings, and the like. He tells the king that he has not found any valuable books or suitable pictures, but sends him two maps of the world,

It seems, as Dr. Björnbo has suggested,[97] that the Paris map here spoken of may be Gourmont’s of 1548, mentioned above. But Grip’s letter contains information about the despatch of the expedition and about the Eskimo kayaks, which cannot be taken from the inscription attached to Hvitserk on that map. The statement about the Eskimo (the Greenland pirates) recalls what Ziegler says in his work “Scondia” (1532) of the inhabitants of Greenland, that “they use light boats of hide, safe in tossing on the sea and among rocks; and thus propelling themselves they fall upon other ships” [Grönl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 499]. It also has some resemblance to what Olaus Magnus says in his later work of 1555 of the Greenland “pirates, who employ hide-boats and an unfair mode of seamanship, since they do not attack the upper parts of merchant ships, but seek to destroy them by boring through the hull from outside, down by the keel,” etc. These statements may be derived from mythical accounts of the Greenland Eskimo, which have come down by some channel we do not know of. Something of the sort may have appeared on some now lost map, from which Grip may have taken it; but his statement as to the two skippers having been sent out by Christiern I. shows that in any case there was in his day a tradition of the voyage of Pining and Pothorst. We must therefore assume that they were despatched on a voyage of discovery by Christiern I. (some time before 1481, when he died), probably at the request of the well-known King Alfonso V. of Portugal (1438-1481). As Hvitserk must be on the coast of Greenland, they seem, in agreement with the other sober statement in Purchas, to have really reached Greenland, perhaps more than once, and to have traded by barter with the natives, which may have ended, as it frequently did later, in skirmishes brought about by the encroachments of the Europeans. This last possibility would explain Grip’s statement about the Greenland pirates attacking in many small ships without keels, as also the mythical statements of Ziegler and Olaus Magnus. Nor is it impossible that Pining may have set up some sea-mark or other there. All this sounds more probable than Olaus Magnus’s wonderful story. But nevertheless it does not appear to me that the authorities now known justify us in altogether rejecting the latter and the date 1494. As there is mention in 1491 of a new “hirdstjore” in Iceland, we must suppose that Pining was either dead or had left the island; if we compare with this the fact that Pining was excluded from the peace that King Hans concluded in 1490 with the Dutch, and thus in a way became an outlaw to the latter, and that in the same year a provisional peace was made with the king of England, by which, of course, all privateering against English subjects on the part of Norwegians and Danes was strictly forbidden, we may possibly perceive a connection. Pining and Pothorst were not able to break themselves of old habits, and thus had both the English king and their own, besides the Dutchmen, against them, and were compelled to fly the country as outlaws. This would also agree with Olaus Magnus’s words, that they were outlawed by the strict edict of the northern kings (“aquilonarium regum severissimo edicto”). It may be supposed that, like the outlawed Eric the Red 500 years before, they took refuge in distant Greenland, which they already knew. But finally they may have come to grief; for among the many “pirates” who “met with a miserable death, being either slain by their friends or hanged on the gallows or drowned in the waves of the sea,” Paulus Eliæ mentions “Pyning” and “Pwthorss.”[98]

We have yet to mention certain obscure statements about another Northern sailor of this time, Johannes Scolvus (Jón Skolv ?).[99] The Spanish author Francesco Lopez de Gomara, who was a priest in Seville about 1550, and published his “Historia de las Indias” (i.e., America) in 1553, says there of “la Tierra de Labrador”:

As, according to Storm’s showing [1886, p. 392], Gomara met Olaus Magnus “in Bologna and Venice” (perhaps about 1548), and says himself that the latter had given him much information about Northern waters and the sea-route from Norway, the statement about Scolvus may also be due to him.

An English State document—probably of 1575, and written on the occasion of the preparations for Frobisher’s first voyage (1576)—gives a brief survey of earlier attempts to find the North-West Passage,[100] and mentions among others Scolvus. This the historians who have written about him have not noticed. After stating that Sebastian [should be John] Cabotte was sent out by King Henry VII. of England in 1496 [should be 1497] to find the passage from the North Sea [i.e., the Atlantic Ocean] to the South Sea [i.e., the Pacific], and that “one Gaspar Cortesreales, a pilot of Portingale,” had visited these islands on the north coast of North America in 1500, the document continues:

Then follows a story of a Spaniard who in 1541 is said to have been on the south side of this passage with a troop of soldiers, and to have found there some ships that had come thither with goods from Cataya (China). Complete impossibilities, like this last story, are thus blended together with statements that have a sure historical foundation, like the voyage of Gaspar Corte-Real. As the statement about Scolus or Scolvus contains things that are not found in Gomara, it seems to be derived from another source; the date in particular is remarkable. That Scolus is a pilot from Denmark, while the pilot Scolvus in Gomara came from Norway, is perhaps immaterial, as of course Norway and Denmark were under a common king, who resided in Denmark.

On an English map of 1582 (after Frobisher’s voyages), which is attributed to Michael Lok, there is a country to the north-west of Greenland, upon which is written: “Jac. Scolvus Groetland.” As the name is here written Jac. Scolvus, it is not likely that it can be derived from the document we have quoted of 1575. The corresponding country on Mercator’s map of 1569 is inscribed: “Groclant, insula cuius incole Suedi sunt origine” (island whose inhabitants are Swedes by descent). It may seem as if this inscription also was connected with Scolvus, and we thus get the third Scandinavian country as his native land; but this word “Suedi” may be derived from Olaus Magnus, who happens to have often used it in the sense of Scandinavians—i.e., Swedes and Norwegians.

In 1597 the Dutchman Cornelius Wytfliet in his description of America (“Continens Indica”) states that its northern part was first discovered by “Frislandish” fishermen [i.e., from the imaginary Frisland of the Zeno map], and subsequently further explored about 1390 during the voyage of the brothers Zeno (which is fictitious).

Estotiland is another fictitious country on the notorious Zeno map (a fabrication from several earlier maps). Apart from this introduction of the Zeno voyage the statement contains nothing that has not already appeared in Gomara and in the English document of 1575, with the exception that Scolvus is called a Pole (Polonus), but this, as pointed out by Storm [1886, p. 399], must be due to a misreading of “Polonus” for “piloto.”[101] As Norway is named first among the countries beyond which the voyage extended, it may have started from thence in Wytfliet’s authority.[102]

On the L’Ecuy globe, of the sixteenth century, there is written in Latin between 70° and 80° N. lat. and in long. 320°:[103] “These are the people to whom the Dane Johannes Scovvus penetrated in the year 1476.” The description of Scolvus as a Dane may indicate the same source as the English mention of him in 1576.[104]

Finally it may be mentioned that Georg Horn in his work “Ulysses peregrinans” (Louvain, 1671), after speaking of voyages of the Icelanders (Thylenses) to “Frisland or Finmark” (sic!), to Iceland, Greenland, Scotland, and Gotland under “auspiciis Margaretæ Semiramis Dan., Sued., Norv.,” and then of the voyages of the Zenos in the year 1390, says:

The Anian-strait was the mythical strait between Asia and north-western America, which was talked about and which appeared upon maps more than a hundred years before Bering Strait was discovered by the Russian Deshenev in 1648. But the name may sometimes have been extended to the whole of the strait, called above, p. 130, the Strait of the Three Brethren, which was assumed to go north of America to the Pacific. What is new in Horn’s statement is that the voyage is said to have been made under the auspices of Christiern I.; it may be supposed that he knew enough of the history of Denmark to draw this conclusion from the date 1476.

This is what is known from old sources about this Scolvus and his voyage. It must be remembered that the name of Labrador (in various forms) was used on the maps of the sixteenth century both for Greenland and Labrador, and was originally the name of the former. It is therefore most probable that the statements about Scolvus’s voyage referred in the first instance to Greenland, which in the first part of the sixteenth century was known as Labrador.

To sum up what has been said above, we have, on the one hand, statements, from wholly different sources, of one or more voyages to Greenland under the leadership of Pining and Pothorst, in the time of Christiern I.—i.e., before 1481; on the other hand, we have statements, probably from several, but at least from two sources independent of each other, about a voyage, also to Greenland, with the pilot Johannes Scolvus, from Denmark or more probably from Norway, in the time of Christiern I., and this is even referred to a particular year, 1476. One is therefore led to conclude, as G. Storm has already done, that we are here concerned with the same voyage or voyages to Greenland, which were made under the leadership of the two “skippers” and freebooters Pining and Pothorst, with Johannes Scolvus (Jón Skolvsson ?) as pilot or navigator. In some authorities of Scandinavian origin the voyage was connected with the names of the real leaders, while in Southern authorities it was connected with that of the pilot or navigator, in the same way as, for instance, the name of William Barentsz was associated with the voyages in which he took part, instead of those of Hemkerck and the other leaders. There seem thus to be sufficiently good historical documents in support of at least one expedition having reached Greenland in the latter part of the sixteenth century, possibly sent out by Christiern I. in 1476, and perhaps there were more. Possibly it was rumours of this new communication with Greenland that awoke a desire in the monk Mathias to go there as bishop.

But then we hear no more of it. For a while longer bishops continued to be appointed to Greenland, a land which was no longer known to any one, and to these bishops least of all. Thus ends the history of the old Greenland settlements. Notices of them become rarer and rarer, with long intermissions, until after this time they cease altogether, and we know no more of the fate of the old Norsemen there.

“The standing-stone on the mound bears no mark,
and Saga has forgotten what she knew.”

CHAPTER XII

In Ottar’s time, or soon after, the Norwegian king asserted his sovereignty over all the Lapps as far as the White Sea, and in the Historia Norwegiæ it is said that Hálogaland reached to Bjarmeland. The headland Vegistafr is mentioned in the Historia Norwegiæ, in the laws, and elsewhere, as the boundary of the kingdom of Norway towards the Bjarmas (Beormas). This may have been on the south side of the Kola peninsula by the river Varzuga, already mentioned, or by the river Umba (see the map, vol. i. p. 170).[105] After Ottar’s time the Norwegians more frequently undertook expeditions, doubtless for the most part of a military character, to the White Sea and Bjarmeland. We hear about several of them in the sagas.

Eric Blood-Axe marched northward, about 920, into Finmark and as far as Bjarmeland, and there fought a great battle and gained the victory. His son, Harold Gråfeld, went northward to Bjarmeland one summer about 965 with his army, and there ravaged the country and had a great fight with the Bjarmas on “Vinu bakka” [i.e., the river bank of the Dvina (Vina)], in which King Harold was victorious and slew many men; and then laid the country waste far and wide, and took a vast amount of plunder. Of this Glumr Geirason speaks:

“Eastward the bold-spoken king
intrepidly stained his sword red,
north of the burning town;
there I saw the Bjarmas run.
For the master of the body-guard good spear-weather
was given on this journey,
on Vina’s bank; the fame
of a young noble travelled far.”

At that time, then, the Norwegians must have reached the Dvina and discovered the east side of the White Sea, which was still unknown to Ottar. They had thus proved it to be a gulf of the sea. The Bjarmas probably lived along the whole of its south side as far as the Dvina, and the name of “Bjarmeland” was now extended to the east side also, and thus became the designation of the country round the White Sea. As a people of strange race of whom they knew little, the Norwegians regarded the Lapps as skilled in magic; but it was natural that the still less known and more distant Bjarmas gradually acquired an even greater reputation for magic, and in these regions stories of trolls and giants were located. The Polar Sea was early called “Hafsbotn,” later “Trollebotten,” and the White Sea was given the name of “Gandvik,” to which a similar meaning is attributed, since it is supposed to be connected with “gand” (the magic of the Lapps); but the name evidently originated in a popular-etymological corruption of a Karelian name, Kanðanlaksi, as already shown (vol. i. pp. 218, f., note).

Snorre Sturlason (ob. 1241) included in the Saga of St. Olaf a legend from Nordland about an expedition to Bjarmeland, supposed to have been undertaken in 1026 by Thore Hund, in company with Karle and his brother Gunnstein from Hálogaland, men of the king’s bodyguard. The tale may be an indication that at that time more peaceful relations had been established between the Nordlanders and the Bjarmas. They went in two vessels, Thore in a great longship with eighty men, and the brothers in a smaller longship with about five-and-twenty. When they came to Bjarmeland, they put in at the market-town;[106] the market began, and all those who had wares to exchange received full value. Thore got a great quantity of skins, squirrel, beaver and sable. Karle also had many wares with him, for which he bought large quantities of furs. But when the market was concluded there, they came down the river Vina; and then they declared the truce with the people of the country at an end. When they were out of the river, they held a council of war, and Thore proposed that they should plunder a sanctuary of the Bjarmas’ god Jomale,[107] with grave mounds, which he knew to be in a wood in that part of the country.[108] They did so by night, found much silver and gold, and when the Bjarmas pursued them, they escaped through Thore’s magical arts, which made them invisible. Both ships then sailed back over Gandvik. As the nights were still light they sailed day and night until one evening they lay to off some islands, took their sails down and anchored to wait for the tide to go down, since there was a strong tide-rip (whirlpool) in front of them (“rǫst mikil var fyrir þeir”). This was probably off “Sviatoi Nos” (the sacred promontory), where Russian authorities speak of a strong current and whirlpool. Here there was a dispute between the brothers and Thore, who demanded the booty as a recompense for their having escaped without loss of life owing to his magical arts. But when the tide turned, the brothers hoisted sail and went on, and Thore followed. When they came to land at “Geirsver” (Gjesvær, a fishing station on the north-west side of Magerö)—where we are told that there was “the first quay as one sails from the north” (i.e., east from Bjarmeland)—the quarrel began again, and Thore suddenly ran his spear through Karle, so that he died on the spot; Gunnstein escaped with difficulty in the smaller and lighter vessel; but was pursued by Thore, and finally had to land and take to flight with all his men at Lenvik, near Malangen fjord, leaving his ship and cargo.