The earlier writers on the subject of the Wineland voyages based their theories very largely on the Flatey version, and indeed accepted its authority as in every way preferable to the alternative rendering of the story. Laing, for example, in his preface to the Heimskringla, laments the fact that any other document besides the Flatey Book should come into the discussion at all: and Hauk’s version is dismissed by a writer in the Cornhill Magazine for 1872 (vol. xxvi) as ‘a later manuscript ... full of the most marvellous impossibilities’. In a slashing and sceptical paper on the subject in vol. VII of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, by R. G. Haliburton, the same view is emphasized. This writer had but little faith in any of the stories, but he treated the Flatey account as at all events preferable to that of the Saga of Eric the Red.
Perhaps none of the writers cited above can be considered as of very high authority, but their attitude is typical of the older school of thought, and the Flatey Book has as great a critic as Vigfusson on its side. They are quoted to show how widely the opinions of students can vary. For since Gustav Storm in 1887 published his Studier over Vinlandsreiserne[72], his views, which have found very general acceptance and still hold the field, have completely reversed the relative status of the different versions. To-day it is the Flatey Book which is criticized, and on all points where it joins issue with the rival version the evidence of the latter is preferred. With great deference to those whose learning has contributed to such a result, it seems to me that such criticism has gone a great deal too far. Let us endeavour impartially to consider the main points wherein there is variance, and thus form our own conclusion as to which story is the more correct.[73]
Herjulf, Bjarni’s father, was undoubtedly a real person, whose name and pedigree occur in Landnáma, and it appears to be historically established that he was one of Eric’s companions when Greenland was colonized in a.d. 985 or 986. A well-known headland in Greenland was named after him, and in fact no one hitherto has ventured to question Herjulf’s existence, or his emigration to Greenland.
We start then from the certain fact that Herjulf, Bjarni’s father, has sailed to Greenland about the summer of 986. If he had a sailor son, absent in Norway on a trading voyage, that son on his return to Iceland would almost certainly endeavour to rejoin his parent in the new colony. All the best available pilots are gone, neither Bjarni nor his crew have any clear knowledge of the seas they will have to traverse, and it is with a knowledge of their risk, clearly stated, that they start sailing west in the direction of Greenland, separated from them by a distance imperfectly known, and also, if there is the slightest deviation to the south of Cape Farewell, in the direction of America. To America we are accordingly informed that they came, driven thither by suitable winds and weather. From America, without landing, without any information to impart as to these strange countries, they returned to Greenland, and Iceland saw no more of Bjarni thenceforward. As fiction, it is a pointless and barren narrative, whatever may be its historical interest to persons of a post-Columbian age. It was evidently disappointing to those who heard and to those who subsequently wrote the story. So far from being treated as a hero, as Professor Fischer would have us believe, we are told that Bjarni received nothing but blame for his lack of enterprise and curiosity on the occasion which chance and unsuccessful navigation had thrown in his way. These were not circumstances favourable to the perpetuation of a story devoid of incident in itself and redounding in no way to the credit of the chief actor in it. It would not be surprising to find that even in Greenland Bjarni’s adventure was not long remembered. The disappearance of the tale from Iceland is a fortiori immensely more probable. The interest of narrator and audience alike were in that country exceptionally domestic. It is the rarest possible exception to hear in Icelandic sagas of the exploits of anyone who had permanently left the country, and whose life never again threw him in contact with Icelanders. Bjarni, from the time he set sail from Eyrarbakki, was, short of a miracle, ‘out of the story’, as the Icelandic narrators would have put it. That the popular account of the voyages of Karlsefni and his predecessors should contain no mention of Bjarni is in accordance with every probability. The alternative appears to me to violate everything that experience teaches us of the development of tradition here and elsewhere. A person, possibly it is said fictitious, at best wholly devoid of interest for Icelandic audiences, is credited with an extremely featureless voyage, from which he derives no sort of kudos, the effect of which is—if anything—to some extent to impair the glory of the Icelander Karlsefni. Such inaccuracy as characterizes tradition has, it may be said with the utmost confidence, the effect of merging the exploits of the less well known with those of the more popular hero: the creation of a fictitious hero in addition to the real one is, I submit, the reverse of the normal process.
Thus, the legends which grew up about Charlemagne endowed that hero with the achievements of earlier Frankish kings and chieftains, and in particular absorbed and confused with Charlemagne his ancestor, Charles Martel. The national traditions of centuries were annexed and grouped round Charlemagne and his circle. On a smaller scale, much the same sort of process can occasionally be traced in saga literature. For instance, the earlier versions of the Landnámabók mention a certain Helgi Thorbrandson, who sailed with Eric to Greenland, and was accordingly less known in Iceland than his brothers, who figure largely in the Eyrbyggja Saga. This saga, therefore, ignores Helgi, and does not mention him among the sons of Thorbrand of Alptafjord. Similarly later editions of Landnáma substitute for Helgi’s name that of his brother Snorri, who went out later to Greenland, and was better known in Iceland. The less-known figure disappears and his history becomes absorbed in that of the better-known character. Such is the normal and natural working of tradition.
Prof. Gustav Storm, in his Studier over Vinlandsreiserne, makes a great point of the fact that though Bjarni’s voyage is represented as taking place about a.d. 986 nothing was done in the nature of further exploration for a period of about sixteen years. I fail to see the force of this argument. It was not till about a century had elapsed from the time when Gunnbjörn, son of Ulf Kráka, sighted an unknown coast to the west of Iceland, that Eric the Red, having made his adopted country too hot to hold him, followed in his track to Greenland. The battered and storm-tossed remnant who successfully accomplished the emigration to Eric’s new colony had little motive, in Bjarni’s bald description of unattractive coasts sighted from shipboard, to induce them to tempt Providence again. Leif, Eric’s son and the explorer of the future, was born in Iceland after the death of his grandfather, and was in all probability still a child. He is the only son of Eric mentioned in Landnámabók, which is concerned with the Icelandic pedigrees only.
On coming of age, and accomplishing the remarkable voyage from Greenland to Norway, having next carried out the difficult task of converting his countrymen to Christianity, it was time for him to look about for fresh worlds to conquer. The old story was recalled, the ship was manned, and the first real discovery and exploration of the new countries was effected, an exploit for which, in the Flatey Book as elsewhere, Leif receives the entire credit, just as his father, and not Gunnbjörn, is everywhere described as the ‘discoverer’ of Greenland.
Next it is said that whereas, in the Flatey version, Leif’s discovery is represented as the result of an expedition deliberately equipped to investigate Bjarni’s reports, it is uniformly described in every other account as an accidental episode of his return voyage from the court of Olaf Tryggvason in Norway. Here again it must be remembered that Leif was by this time a Greenlander, as to the exact details of whose exploits Iceland was likely to be imperfectly informed and but little interested. The main facts of his career might be known: that he was a son of Eric the Red, that he sailed to Norway and introduced Christianity to Greenland, that he rescued a crew of shipwrecked persons—more especially if, as related in the Flatey Book, one of these was the Icelandic heroine Gudrid—that he discovered somehow and at some time Wineland the Good, and thereby gave rise to Karlsefni’s subsequent expedition. More exact knowledge was not necessary as a prelude to the story of the adventures of the Icelandic hero Karlsefni; in fact, in so far as there is likely to have been any conscious interference with the truth, it may be observed that the less Leif’s voyage was dwelt on the greater would be the credit attaching to the later explorer, in whom alone Icelanders were likely to be generally interested. Such a state of things was eminently calculated to produce the fusion by tradition of two voyages into one, which was likely to be more generally known for two obvious reasons. In the first place, Leif’s voyage to Norway and his return with Olaf Tryggvason’s mission to Greenland was an important fact in the history of that proselytizing king. In the second, it was of interest to the priests who became the historians both of Iceland and Norway. As I have urged already, merger rather than expansion is the normal trend of tradition. The ‘man in the street’ at the present day might well be acquainted, for example, with an incident in the career of Captain Cook, without being able accurately to assign it to the correct voyage of the navigator, or indeed without being certain as to the exact number of the voyages for which he was distinguished. It is far more likely, in my opinion, that such a merger took place in Leif’s story as usually summarized in Iceland than that an imaginary and distinct voyage should have been invented and described with much circumstance and detail.
But, it is said, the Flatey Book’s account stands alone, while that of Hauk, short as it is, is corroborated elsewhere, by a body of independent evidence. On examination, however, this body of evidence shrinks to the dimensions of a single passage, repeated in one context with unimportant verbal variations in a number of different manuscripts.
The oldest extant version of this passage, that occurring in the Friis codex of the Book of the Kings of Norway, will be found included in the Appendix to our translation (p. 74). Another example, from the great Olaf Tryggvason Saga, may be usefully given here, for purposes of comparison:
‘That same spring when Olaf the King sent Gizur and Hjalti to Iceland, as has already been written, he also sent Leif Ericson to Greenland, to preach Christianity there. The King got him a priest and other holy men, to baptize the people there and teach them the right faith. Leif went that summer to Greenland. He took at sea a ship’s crew, who were then in misfortune, and lay on a completely broken wreck of a ship, and on that voyage he found Wineland the Good, and came at the end of that summer to Greenland, and went home to Brattahlid to his father Eric. Men called him afterwards Leif the Lucky. But Eric his father said that the account was balanced, since Leif had preserved and given life to the men of the ship’s crew, and had brought the hypocrite to Greenland, so he called the priest.’
A similar passage in the Heimskringla may also be compared.
Besides these we have also a shorter passage in the Kristni Saga, which has been preserved for us in Hauk’s Book. This last, translated in the same baldly literal manner, may also be found in the Appendix of Supplementary Passages, p. 75.
Now the first thing noticeable about all these passages is that they occur in exactly the same context, the history of King Olaf Tryggvason’s missionary enterprises. We have further the authority of Vigfusson for saying that both the Kristni Saga and the Book of Kings, though in their present shape they have passed through the hands of various editors, were in their original form products of the pen of Ari the Learned. We have therefore in all these cases one author, one context, and substantially one phraseology.
And, setting aside for the moment the exact form of words used, we may fairly say that the essential meaning of these various passages is as follows:—Olaf Tryggvason also brought about the conversion of Greenland. For this purpose he found an excellent agent in Leif, the son of the founder of that colony, a man who attained distinction in many ways, for he not only introduced the faith into those benighted regions but he also earned the title of ‘Lucky’ by the discovery of Wineland, and a brave and sensational rescue of a crew of shipwrecked men. It will be observed that Leif’s career is only relevant in this context in so far as it comes in contact with that of Olaf Tryggvason, with whom the writer is principally concerned, and all that it was necessary for him to know, and possibly all that he did know, was the fact that Leif was Olaf’s missionary and that he had various other claims to distinction. The when or the how of these various adventures of Leif were altogether beside the point, and did not need to be closely investigated. In this way, without any blame attaching to the original chronicler, even if he was responsible for the present order of the words, a false idea of the circumstances of Leif’s discovery may easily have been started in Iceland.
Between the two ‘thættir’ or episodes which make up our story as incorporated in the Flatey Book Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, the passage already quoted from other texts appears, slightly edited into conformity with the Wineland story of the book by the omission of any reference to that country (see Appendix of Supplementary Passages, p. 75). The editing is incomplete, for the rescue of the crew remains, to be repeated under different circumstances later on; but inasmuch as the whole passage is obviously derived from the same source as the others which have been mentioned, no point can legitimately be made of this other than that the scribes of the Flatey Book did not carry the interference with their sources very far, which on the whole only goes to indicate that the Wineland story as they copied it suffered no alteration in the process, a fact in favour of this version rather than otherwise.
It also shows that the thættir were drawn from an independent source.
We may sum up the argument on this branch of the case as follows:
1. Leif was a person who came within the range of Icelandic interest not because of his exploits in themselves, which rather concerned Greenland, but because they had a bearing on the history of an Icelandic hero, Karlsefni, and of a Norse king, Olaf Tryggvason.
2. For this purpose the precise circumstances and date of his Wineland voyage were quite irrelevant.
3. The accounts therefore which appear of this voyage, both in Hauk’s account of Wineland and in the sagas of Olaf Tryggvason, are, as we should expect, extremely short and superficial.
4. The account of Leif given in the Flatey Book, on the other hand, is extremely circumstantial and detailed and appears to have been written from a more intimate knowledge of the facts.
5. The normal course of tradition is rather to blend many voyages into one than to expand one voyage, in one and the same story, into many.
One other point may be mentioned.
Part at all events of the Flatey Book version is accepted by the majority of those who have studied the subject, especially the observation recorded of the length of the shortest day, which is indeed one of the most circumstantial points to be found in any of these stories. Now assuming this observation to be correctly attributed to Leif, and it is recorded of no one else, then it is plain that Leif must have wintered in the new country, and at the most southerly point in it to which he penetrated. The alternative accounts are one and all wholly inconsistent with any such idea. According to these, Wineland was discovered by Leif while endeavouring to return from Norway to Greenland in the summer of the year 1000. In the first place, at least two of the texts giving this version of the story state distinctly, and the others imply, that he arrived in Greenland in the year in which he set sail. (Cf. Fríssbók: ‘He came in the autumn to Greenland’, and the passage occurring in the body of the Flatey Book’s Saga of Olaf Tryggvason: ‘He came at the end of that summer to Greenland.’)
But apart from these statements we may ask ourselves,—is it likely that Leif would have passed the winter in Wineland, unless he came there on a definite voyage of exploration? On the hypothesis of accident he had come, and knew he had come, a tremendous distance out of his way by the time he made land on the coast of America. Would he have had either the supplies or the inclination to stay the winter in the newly discovered land? Supposing that—as the Flatey Book tells us—he arrived first at Helluland, why should he have sailed south across open sea from that point if his destination was Greenland? If he followed the coast he would arrive in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and would come across nothing resembling the Wineland of the story.[74] And it is incredible that he should have put directly to sea in the direction opposite to his objective and happened by chance upon the two more southerly ‘lands’. Again, if we suppose him to have gone through the experience recorded of Bjarni, is it not still more unlikely that he would have elected to pass the whole autumn and winter in the very first place at which he touched, without provisions and so very far from home? Would he not at least have sailed for Greenland after a very cursory examination of the country, however much he might have contemplated returning thither on another occasion? Even if we reject the circumstantial version of the Flatey Book altogether and attribute the observation of the sun to Karlsefni, of whom it is nowhere recorded, it seems to me that the delay necessary to collect the samples of local products mentioned in Eric’s Saga and Hauk’s Book is most unlikely to have taken place if the discovery of the country was accidental and the party desirous of returning to Greenland. For these reasons, therefore, in addition to those given above, it seems to me that we are justified in taking the Flatey version as authentic.
Storm, in his Studier over Vinlandsreisrne, urges that it was more likely that Leif, returning from Norway to Greenland, should have been driven out of his course to America than that Bjarni should have met the same fate on the shorter journey from Iceland. In the state of navigation at the time it is course by no means incredible that either captain should have missed his destination by the necessary margin. There were practically no limits to the possible deviation in those days. Thorstein, sailing to Wineland, is said to have been driven by contrary gales to the neighbourhood both of Iceland and Ireland, and whether this be true or no it clearly cannot have struck an Icelandic audience as at all improbable. It has however to be remembered that Leif, assuming the discovery to have been made on the voyage from Norway, was retracing a known course, and traversing a known distance; and if we follow the only version which supplies information on the point, he, like Karlsefni, was carried first to Helluland, which seems to argue a direction of the wind which could not be very unfavourable for his projected destination, Greenland; Bjarni, on the other hand, set out on a voyage of uncertain length across an unknown sea, and his landfall in America is stated to have been so far to the south as to point to really contrary winds. Subject to these remarks I do not think that there is much in the point, either one way or the other.
The next difference to be noted is with regard to the fate of Thorvald Ericson. The Flatey Book assigns to him an independent voyage, and a reasonable death at the hands of the savages. The details of this voyage are given at length, and substantially in a natural and credible form. The other version of his death is clearly incredible, for it introduces the agency of a ‘uniped’, fabulous creature, not unknown to classical legend.
Hauk’s story, moreover, makes Thorvald a companion of Karlsefni, not an independent explorer. It has further to be noticed that until the episode of his death it is not certain that the original wording of this text recognizes Thorvald Ericson at all. Up to the point of Karlsefni’s expedition the only reference to Eric’s family in either of the companion texts reads as follows: ‘At that time Eric had a wife named Thjodhild, and by her two sons, one called Thorstein and the other Leif’: Thorvald, it will be observed, is not mentioned at all. In the list of those accompanying Karlsefni, the purer text of Eric’s Saga again contains no reference to this son of the house. ‘There was a man named Thorvald’, it runs, ‘who was a connexion by marriage of Eric the Red.’ Thorvald, the connexion by marriage, is obviously not Eric’s son, but, as Hauk correctly so far amends the passage, a slip for ‘Thorvard, who married Freydis, an illegitimate daughter of Eric the Red’. Hauk then interpolates ‘and Thorvald Ericson’ in conformity with the story of his death which is subsequently introduced. This, the uniped episode, seems to be later in origin than the main body of the saga. The melodramatic death-speech of Thorvald is borrowed almost verbatim from the death-scene of Thormod Kolbrunarskald, as given in the Heimskringla; so that a Greenlander in Wineland is here represented as intelligently anticipating the utterance of an Icelander in Norway. Then again the uniped, as has already been pointed out, is a borrowed conception: it is not a creature typical of the normal superstitions of early Scandinavia. The passage, as will be seen on a reference to the text, where it has been omitted, is in no way necessary to the story, and the sense is not affected by its absence. It would seem therefore as if the author of the text on which Hauk’s version is founded, having derived from another source an exaggerated and romanticized account of Thorvald’s death in Wineland, interpolated it in the saga without taking the trouble to make his account of Eric’s family or Karlsefni’s companions tally with the final form of the story.
Two of the arguments which I have already used apply with equal force to this part of the question. Thorstein, as the husband of Gudrid, who subsequently became by her marriage with Karlsefni an Icelandic heroine, was a person necessary to an Icelandic version of the story. So was Leif, because his voyage, however and whenever accomplished, was the reason of Karlsefni’s subsequent exploration. But Thorvald was a person in no way interesting to Icelanders; he had gone to Greenland with his father, probably as a child, and was ‘out of the story’. The other point is the normal trend of tradition. The important voyage, to Icelanders, was Karlsefni’s, and it was likely in the ordinary course, like Aaron’s serpent, to swallow up all minor rivals, whose continued existence was not necessary to its own. The Flatey Book version of Thorvald’s adventures and death appears to me therefore infinitely more satisfactory than the other, and the objections to it seem to have but little weight.
All that has been said hitherto applies to the second voyage of Freydis. After Karlsefni’s return to Iceland his interest in Greenland and in Wineland ceased, and with his own ceased naturally the interest of the normal Icelandic historian and audience. ‘And that is the end of this story’, says the author of Eric the Red’s Saga, as he lays down his pen, having got Karlsefni safe at home, and his Icelandic descendants duly chronicled. What happened in Greenland later on is no concern of his. But life in Greenland went on, and it cannot in any way be said to follow that nothing happened in the family of Eric because nothing has been recorded in a saga dealing mainly with a different person. Those who would attack the authenticity of this voyage must take other ground, and show from the story itself that it is inherently impossible. The task has no doubt been attempted, but it seems to me that the saga emerges successfully from the ordeal. The conduct of Freydis and her husband as described in the Flatey Book is entirely consistent with their characters as delineated in the rival version. I am wholly unable to follow the reasoning of Laing, who considers this incident in itself incredible, though others seem to share his view. The independence and power for evil possessed by an Icelandic wife of the saga period are well illustrated in the Njál Saga, where the wives of Njál and Gunnar respectively carry on a bloody vendetta with complete immunity to themselves, but at no inconsiderable expense to their reluctant but powerless husbands, who, though on terms of complete amity, are continually forced to pay each other compensation for the murder of members of their households perpetrated by third parties on the instigation of these women.
Of course the interview between Freydis and Finnbogi cannot be authentic, as no witness was left but Freydis herself, whose version would naturally be different, and the details of the story may well have been worked up by a later hand.
But consider the facts apart from this: Freydis, a woman everywhere represented as of masculine temper, is married to a wealthy nonentity named Thorvard. From the contemptuous vituperation which Freydis pours upon her panic-stricken companions in the skræling fight in Hauk’s Book we get a fine insight into her character. She and her husband sail to Wineland with Helgi and Finnbogi, whom she swindles and bullies at every turn. The crews of the two ships are soon not on speaking terms; a very little more will lead to a violent encounter. The brothers have a much better ship than Freydis, and on this ship she, who has got her way in every other respect, has set her heart. She makes a fruitless attempt to bargain for the coveted vessel, as Ahab treated first for Naboth’s vineyard. Her overtures repulsed, she returns in a rage to her miserable and helpless husband, to whom she represents the conduct of Helgi and Finnbogi as an insult only to be wiped out in blood. The henpecked Thorvard is screwed to the sticking-place, he turns out his men, between whom and the rival crew there is already a quarrel, smouldering under the cover of an armed neutrality. The camp of the brothers is attacked, and the men are assassinated. The women remain, damning witnesses of the outrage, whom nevertheless male chivalry would spare. ‘Hand me an axe’, says Freydis (‘Infirm of purpose, give me the daggers’). The coup is not to be ruined by humanitarian scruples: dead men (and women) tell no tales. The massacre is completed. Surely it is all consistent with our experience of women of this type in history and even in modern life. Man draws the line, he is ruled by convention, there are ‘things no fellow can do’. Woman is a law to herself, and as a result there are heights to which she climbs where no man’s ideals will follow, and depths to which she falls from which men are fortunately protected. With men, treachery and cowardice go hand in hand; in women a masculine bravery seems merely to kill their natural delicacy and horror of blood, they can be brave and yet sink to the lowest excesses of meanness and cruelty. Judith, Jezebel, Lady Macbeth—how brave they are, and yet how disgracefully treacherous! It is of course a matter for individual judgement: the touchstone for such a tale is not to be found among the canons of criticism. To me this dreadful story reads as one of the most natural, consistent, and human episodes in history; and though of course such characterization is not beyond the powers of a brilliant writer of fiction, it seems to me far more reasonable to accept it as authentic history. Why should this awful libel disfigure the annals of the distinguished house of Eric the Red, if there were nothing in it? Who would dare to invent it, if it were not true?
I contend, then, that on main lines, where the two stories are in conflict, it is preferable throughout to adopt the version of the Flatey Book, and that the alleged discrepancies come to nothing more than this, that the natural development of tradition in Iceland led, to a great extent, to the ignoring of some elements in the story and the fusion of others in what, to Icelanders, were the more important episodes. Some slight additional support to the view which has been here put forward is supplied by Adam of Bremen’s reference to Wineland, which has been referred to in another chapter. For he states that this country has been ‘a multis repertam’, that is to say, discovered or explored by many. This, so far as it goes, is in favour of the Flatey Book, for a country visited on but two occasions, one of which was accidental, could hardly be so described.
Even where the narratives are in closer agreement, the Flatey Book appears to me on the whole the more reliable version.
Especially is this the case with the courses given in the narrative. According to the Saga of Eric the Red and Hauk’s Book, Karlsefni rarely sailed in any direction except south. Thus, Greenland to Helluland is south; Helluland to Markland either south or south-east; Markland to Keelness south according to Hauk, the companion version being silent; Straumsfjord to Hóp, once more, south. Now, wherever we place the lands discovered in America, the situation really calls for a great deal more west than south for a large part of the voyage. In a statement which is only approximate, the bearing we need is south-west. This occurs nowhere in the synoptic versions. Now compare the Flatey Book. Bjarni’s return is all north-east; the lands therefore lie, as they do in fact, on a south-westerly line. Leif sails south-west from Markland to Wineland, and it is implied that his course elsewhere corresponded with Bjarni’s. This gives us at any rate good foundation for supposing the data in the Flatey Book to be the more authentic. At the very least these statements go far to establish the entire independence of the Flatey version, and to demolish the suggestion already dealt with that this narrative is merely a perverted embroidery of hints contained in the other.
It is astonishing to find that Storm and his school prefer the courses set out in the rival version, and seem to evince great difficulty in making anything of the Flatey Book’s geography. They even say that the latter conveys to them the idea of a coast facing north or north-east. How this is arrived at it is difficult to see. When Bjarni turned in a north-easterly direction to search for a way home, we are told that he ‘left the land on the port side’. This clearly indicates that the coast lay to the north of him and faced south, trending away to the north in a little while so as to disappear from sight. So again Thorvald from his base in Wineland can go east or west, but to reach ‘the more northerly part of the country’ he has first to turn east. This conveys the same idea as Bjarni’s voyage, a south-facing coast, turning to the north at its eastern extremity. True, there is a word in this voyage which seems to imply an easterly course after leaving Keelness; this will be discussed later, but in any case, if it had to be rejected, it would not justify the views expressed by Storm and his followers as to the Flatey Book’s geography as a whole.
I have incorporated the rival version of Karlsefni’s voyage in the story as I have rendered it, as the differences are but small, and the version adopted is less condensed and therefore fuller of information. I will however give an instance to show that here also the Flatey version is the more likely to be accurate. Undoubtedly the oldest parts of the text of either authority are the verses ascribed to Thorhall the Hunter in the saga adopted by Hauk. These are admitted by the most exacting critics to bear all the indications of a date corresponding with their ascribed origin. Even Dr. Nansen allows their genuineness. Now it will probably have struck the careful reader that the second of these two poems bears no sort of relation to its context. The verses, either expressly or by necessary implication, convey the following facts:
1. They are the utterance of a person who is leaving the New World behind, to return to his own country.
2. Those whom he is leaving behind him are at Furdustrands.
3. These people are satisfied with a diet of boiled whale, which the poet considers unattractive.
The text, on the other hand, conveys a totally different set of facts:
1. The verses are composed by a person who is proposing to coast northwards in search of Wineland.
2. The explorers are at Straumsfjord, far to the south of Furdustrands, and the main body are proposing to go even further away from that locality. (I do not, however, attach much importance to this discrepancy, believing as I do that the name Furdustrands was applied broadly to a large district in which Straumsfjord may well have been included.)
3. The one person who appeared pleased with the whale, and indeed claimed the credit for its appearance, was the author of the poem. The rest were made ill by it, and on hearing of its supposed origin refused altogether to eat it.
These differences are clearly quite irreconcilable, and, the poem being the more reliable authority, the version in the text at this point must be abandoned. As Storm says, the fact that the author has plainly misunderstood the verses quoted is in itself evidence of the greater age of the latter. But in the Flatey Book, though, the account being much condensed, no mention is made of Thorhall or his verses, the whale is given a perfectly natural origin, and is eaten without any contretemps by the whole body of the explorers. We may, however, reasonably assume that such fare would not be relished by a fastidious person, and might well provoke the utterance of the sentiments embodied in the old song. There is at all events no inconsistency between the text of the Flatey Book and the poem.
There are one or two minor discrepancies which must now be considered. Leif’s visit to Norway is said in the Flatey Book to have taken place sixteen years after Eric’s colonization of Greenland. This would date his arrival after Olaf’s death in September 1000. But Eric had explored Greenland with an eye to the colony three years before it was actually inaugurated, and if we take it that the date of the first visit is referred to as part of the same transaction this point disappears.
In no other account in Icelandic literature do we find Gudrid mentioned as the widow or wife of Thori Eastman, i.e. the Norwegian, whom Leif rescued from the wreck. It is still not improbable that she was so. Gudrid apparently arrived in Greenland about the time that Leif was absent on his voyage of discovery, and Thori, from his remarks as reported in the Flatey Book, seems to have been acquainted with Brattahlid before his shipwreck, which was not far from the coast of Greenland. Supposing him to have married Gudrid about this time, we are told that he died the same winter, and Gudrid would almost immediately be free to be married, as we are told she was, to Thorstein Ericson; consequently when Karlsefni married her, which was the important incident in her career from the point of view of the saga genealogists, she would be, as all accounts make her, Thorstein’s widow, and the brief episode of her marriage with the comparatively insignificant Thori would soon be forgotten, particularly as Thori was a Norwegian, and therefore of no interest to Icelanders.
A more important question arises in connexion with various conflicting statements as to the ultimate religious faith of Eric the Red, and the precise time of his death. On these points the Flatey Book is not quite consistent with itself, for in the body of the Olaf Tryggvason Saga, chap. 352, it states that Eric was converted. This passage, however, is evidently from a different source, and speaking broadly we have the statement in the Flatey Book that Eric died in the winter following Leif’s return from Wineland, which would hardly give time for his admittedly slow conversion to Christianity, while in Hauk’s version Eric lives on to the time of Karlsefni. The repeated statements in other authorities as to Eric’s low opinion of the priest, whom he described as a humbug or hypocrite, give colour to the theory that he died unconverted. The priestly chronicler of his achievements, on the other hand, would doubtless favour any rumour of the final conversion of his hero. It would hardly do, if it could be avoided, to leave this pioneer of colonial enterprise in the hell which the belief of the period would inevitably assign to him if he refused to the end to abandon his old creed.
I am inclined to think, on the whole, that the Flatey Book is correct in saying that Eric was dead when the later voyages took place.
If we glance at the chronology we find that Eric, by 981 or 982 (date of first Greenland voyage), had been long enough in Iceland to have made many friends as well as enemies. Before he came to Iceland he was old enough to be implicated in homicide with his father.[75] He married, and one son was born before his three years’ exile from Iceland. The sons of Thord Gelli, brothers, that is, of Karlsefni’s grandmother, were among his active enemies. The father of Gudrid, Thorbjörn Vifilson, was among his contemporaries, as was Herjulf, who had a grown-up son who had owned a ship for some years in 985–6. True, Snorri Godi, born 963, and the sons of Thorbrand of Alptafjord, were among those who participated in his quarrels, but they must have been among his younger contemporaries. In 985 or 986 Eric had an established position as a leader of men; at the date of Leif’s voyage he considered himself an old man. If we put his birth midway between that of Snorri Godi (963) and his father (938), we shall not then be far wrong. Eric, therefore, would be born about 950.
Now Karlsefni’s voyage, in spite of some statements to the contrary in the sagas, cannot have taken place till about a quarter of a century after Leif’s, whether we date the latter from a.d. 1000, following Hauk, or 1002, accepting the Flatey Book. This, though not generally recognized, is clear from the known dates of the descendants of Karlsefni’s Wineland-born son. Snorri’s grandson, Bishop Thorlak, was born, as we find in the Annals, in 1085; Bishop Brand the first, Snorri’s great-grandson, died in 1201. Brand’s mother therefore, of the same generation as Thorlak, can hardly have been born so early as 1085. Putting the mean date of the birth of Snorri’s children at thirty years before 1085, which is making a liberal allowance, we get the date 1055. Snorri therefore cannot have been born much before 1025. If the Flatey Book is correct, Gudrid was married in 1003, and she certainly was of a marriageable age before leaving Iceland, and was a widow when Karlsefni married her. Karlsefni’s voyage and the birth of Snorri should accordingly be placed rather earlier than 1025, say 1020. At this time Eric would be about 70 years old, and, especially if he was ageing in 1002, it is most improbable that he survived so long amid the hardships of life in Greenland.
Again, when King Olaf the Holy, about 1018, wished to get rid of the troublesome blind king Rörek, and commissioned Thorar Nefjolfson to take him to Greenland, it was Leif Ericson, and not his father, whom he designated as consignee. (Vide Heimskringla, Saga of Olaf the Holy, c. 85.)
Finally, it seems strange that Leif should not have accompanied Karlsefni on his voyage if there was nothing in particular for him to do in Greenland, whereas if the management of Brattahlid and the control of the colony had devolved on his shoulders by his father’s death, the position is quite intelligible.[76]
There is accordingly abundant reason to conclude that on this point also the Flatey Book is right, and Hauk is wrong.
Other small discrepancies which have not escaped the vigilance of commentators can be explained as clerical slips, and consequently do not go to the root of the matter. The alleged improbability of certain details in both narratives will fall to be discussed hereafter.
It seems to me, however, that too much importance may easily be attached to the fruits of this sort of microscopic criticism. The broad fact that we have two quite independent versions telling to all intents and purposes the same story—at any rate providing material for a substantially consistent and circumstantial history collated from both sources—is much more important than the existence of any number of minor discrepancies. By placing ourselves as far as possible in the positions both of the actors and chroniclers of these adventures we are likely, I think, to get a fuller appreciation of the facts as they were and of the truth with which they have been related than if we pore with a too studious eye over every line and every word, with a view, if it be possible, to establish an inevitable but trivial inconsistency.
The reader who has carefully followed the argument so far will at this point probably be disposed to make some such observation as follows: You argue that the story is more likely to have lost the additional facts given in the Flatey Book than to have invented them by the natural operation of tradition. Well and good. You also point out, with a certain amount of plausibility, that the probable state of interest and knowledge in Iceland was just such as to produce precisely those alterations and omissions from what you consider the true course of the story, which, according to you, have taken place in what we may call Hauk’s version. You appear to forget, however, that both texts are Icelandic, and that this argument ought therefore to apply with equal force to the Flatey version, where the parts uninteresting to Icelanders are notwithstanding retained.
My first answer to this would be that it is quite possible that actual facts might be retained in one version in Iceland, even though not of great interest to the people of that country, but it is highly improbable that an Icelandic chronicler would be at the pains to supply by invention precisely those points in which his audience would feel the least concern.
My own private conviction, however, is that the Flatey version is in the main drawn from a Greenland source. Here we are embarking upon conjecture, a conjecture, by the way, which has been made before, but it may be interesting shortly to consider the grounds upon which such a theory is based.
It is in the first place improbable that in the narrow confines of Iceland two quite independent versions of the same story should exist side by side. The original story-tellers in this country were peripatetic, there was a close intercourse between families residing in different parts of the island, and it would be strange if the tradition of one district had remained unaffected by that of another. But the point most universally admitted with regard to these two versions is that, except for certain introductory and genealogical points derived from a common source, the Landnámabók, while on the whole the facts correspond, the stories are obviously independent.
This curious circumstance is at once explained if we suppose the historian of the Flatey Book to have had access to a saga composed in Greenland.
Next, it is a marked and unique characteristic of the Flatey manuscript considered as a whole that the library from which it was derived was evidently rich in literature treating of the Scandinavian colonies which existed outside the confines of Iceland. This feature has been noticed by Vigfusson in his preface to the Orkney Saga in the Rolls Series (p. xxxii). ‘Its pages’, he writes of the Flatey Book, ‘preserve more than half of all we know of the older history of the Orkneys, the Faroes, Greenland, and Vineland (America). Indeed John Haconson and his two scribes seem for some reason, now unknown, to have paid particular attention to gathering up every scrap relating to these neighbour-lands of Outer, or Colonial, Scandinavia.’ It is therefore precisely in such a work as the Flatey Book that we might expect to find incorporated a saga derived from an outlandish source such as I have suggested. We know, too, that the practice of saga-telling went on in the new colony as in the old, as indeed was a priori probable. In the Saga, of Eric the Red such a form of entertainment is expressly mentioned as a means whereby the nights of the Arctic winter were enlivened during the visit of Karlsefni to Brattahlid. The stock-in-trade of these Greenland story-tellers must inevitably have included a detailed account of the founder of the colony, thus supplying a rival ‘Eric’s Saga’ such as I have argued (supra, p. 108) that the Flatey Book is referring to in the passage where ‘Eric’s Saga’ is mentioned. Now, on turning to internal evidence, we shall find that corroboration of the theory advanced is by no means wanting. Not only does the Flatey Book, as has been remarked already, supply precisely those episodes in which Greenland rather than Iceland would be interested, e.g. Bjarni’s voyage, the circumstances, date, and details of Leif’s, and the full description of Eric’s family, but conversely, where Greenland interest would naturally cease, the Flatey Book is far less rich in detail than its rivals. Take, for example, the case of Gudrid. To Icelanders this lady was a most important character, the ancestress of many distinguished men. To Greenlanders she was a girl who paid a temporary visit to the colony, and was for a few months the wife of a son of the house of Brattahlid who met with an early death, before the promise of his youth was fulfilled. She then married the Icelander, Karlsefni, and disappeared from their ken. Consequently, though the Icelandic scribe of the Flatey Book has been able to supply some facts about her descendants in the concluding paragraphs of the story, we find an extraordinary lack of information on the subject of Gudrid in this version as compared with the other.
In the Flatey Book she is subordinate in importance to the truculent Freydis and her henpecked husband. Besides the principal adventures of this couple we are given a summary of their characters, the mercenary nature of their union, and the exact place of their abode, which is described in a phrase of more interest, one would think, to a Greenland than an Icelandic audience, as ‘Garda, where the cathedral is now’. Of Gudrid’s origin we are told nothing. She appears suddenly in the Flatey Book as the wife of the Norseman Thori, who was rescued at sea by Leif. Of this marriage, which is only recorded in this one source, I have spoken already. Whether it is to be accepted as a fact or no is not for the moment material, the point is that Gudrid comes abruptly into the story as a person whose previous history is of no importance. In the rival versions she is the principal character, who holds the stage from start to finish. The saga opens with a passage—otherwise irrelevant—explaining the origin of her family in Iceland, in the days of her alleged grandfather, Vifil. Next, after Eric the Red has migrated to Greenland, we have another interlude devoted to explaining the reasons which brought about her emigration with her father to the new colony, followed by a description of the sibyl’s séance in which Gudrid played so important a part, which is so vivid and real as to give rise to the suspicion that it may have been derived from the description of Gudrid herself.
Now the usually accepted explanation of the Flatey version is that, being composed in the north of Iceland, in close proximity to the religious establishment associated with Gudrid’s piety, and in the district where Karlsefni’s family were settled, the story is derived from the reports of the Icelandic explorer. And indeed, the final paragraphs, wherein the descendants of the pair are duly recorded, may well be ascribed to a local origin. That some combination of different sources takes place at this point is indicated by the fact that the statement ‘many men are descended from Karlsefni’ occurs twice over in separate places towards the end of the saga. It reads, in fact, exactly as if the final passage beginning ‘and when Karlsefni was dead’ was an addition from local sources. But is it not in the last degree surprising, if the accepted theory be true of the whole story, that here alone we should be imperfectly informed as to the career and descent of the local heroine?
Again, if this story is the result of the full report which we are told that Karlsefni left of his adventures, is it not remarkable that in the description of this voyage alone the Flatey Book gives place, in point of circumstance and detail, to the rival account? Not a word is said of the Icelandic co-adventurers, Bjarni Grimolfson and Snorri; nay, we are given to understand that Karlsefni had come from Norway, without stopping on his way in Iceland to join forces with any such companions. And the whole story of the voyage, unlike the other expeditions detailed in the Flatey Book, is, when compared with the alternative account, quite sketchy and meagre. It may well be accurate as far as it goes, for Karlsefni evidently returned to Greenland before proceeding home, and many of his companions were Greenlanders, but it is, as one would expect of a Greenland version of this story, compressed into the briefest summary.
If the account of the Wineland voyages to be found in the Flatey Book originated in Greenland, it is evident that it was far less exposed than the Icelandic sagas to literary and other influences derived from communication with other countries. Intercourse between Greenland and the outside world must always have been rare, and the effect of the edict issued by the King of Norway in 1294 creating trade relations with Greenland a crown monopoly led very speedily to the decline and disappearance of the colony, which appears to have been completed about a.d. 1400. In particular, the edict cut off communication from Iceland. Only in one respect should we expect to find a Greenland saga affected by modern developments. And this is just what we actually do find in the present case.
As Dr. Storm has pointed out in the preface to his excellent edition of the Saga of Eric the Red, the Flatey narrative contains an extraordinary number of direct voyages between Greenland and Norway. Apart from Bjarni Herjulfson, there is first Karlsefni’s arrival, which is here stated to be from Norway; there is his return, direct to Norway, where he sells his ‘húsa-snotra’ to a German from Bremen; and finally there is the arrival of the brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, from Norway, in the story of Freydis’s expedition.
Now Dr. Storm sees in all this merely an additional count in his indictment against the Flatey Book. This talk of direct voyages between Greenland and Norway smacks of the days of the royal monopoly; Germans from Bremen suggest a date subsequent to the establishment of the Hanseatic League in Bergen. I think these anachronisms are established with some degree of certainty; but it also occurs to me that the mistake is more suggestive of a Greenland than an Icelandic source. It is difficult to suppose that the infrequent ships which sailed to Greenland under the royal monopoly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did not in fact call at Iceland, which lay directly in their track. If they did so, they would not suggest to an Icelander the idea of direct voyages between Norway and Greenland; if they did not, they would not be present to the Icelandic mind at all. To a Greenlander of about the period of the Flatey Book’s composition, or even earlier, any ship which arrived off Greenland would, on the other hand, be ‘a ship from Norway’; i.e. a ship bringing his necessary supplies from the only available source. And, as the original sagas handed down to him would hardly be concerned very much with the origin or destination of the ships which came to Greenland, the error of introducing Norway might easily creep in.
So too with the episode of the Bremen merchant. It smacks of the fourteenth century, and it is obvious that the doings of Karlsefni after leaving Greenland would not be accurately known to an inhabitant of that country. But it seems not improbable that the Greenlanders, being without timber, continued to visit the new lands to obtain such commodities, especially for use in ship-building, and indeed the Icelandic Annals for 1347 contain an allusion to a ship coming from Markland. It must be remembered that ‘mösur’ wood is not elsewhere specifically mentioned in the Flatey Book account, which makes it probable that this passage is from a different source from the main narrative. But, at a later date, some anonymous Greenlander may well have sold a ‘húsa-snotra’, which appears to have been something connected with a ship, to a German at Bergen or elsewhere, and, in conformity with the tendency to which allusion has been made of attributing the actions of lesser-known characters to those more distinguished, the transaction may easily have come to be associated with Karlsefni, as the principal hero of the Wineland tradition, and the only one who after his return left the coasts of Greenland.
All this points to Greenland as the country where the Flatey Book version of the story originated, and if this be so it not only accounts for several inconsistencies in the rival versions, but renders it likely that the account here preserved escaped the contamination which affected the later Icelandic sagas, through the influence of foreign literature.