It has now, I think, been established that the Norse discovery of America is an historical fact, and that the broad lines of the story have a substantial claim to be regarded as history. While so much has been and must be generally admitted, there is still a considerable difference of opinion as to how far the details of any and which of the versions are to be treated as part of an authentic record, and how far, if at all, the saga has become contaminated with external and mythological influences. Some writers, such as Rafn and Horsford, have treated these records with a credulity to which no early work of history is probably entitled; others, of whose views Dr. Nansen is perhaps the most distinguished exponent, consider the admissible element of truth to have been so overlaid with fiction and imported mythology that the details can no longer make any claim to be regarded as historical. ‘It will therefore be seen’, says the writer last referred to, ‘that the whole narrative of the Wineland voyages is a mosaic of one feature after another gathered from East and West.’[77]
Between these two schools of opinion it is necessary for us to pick our way, and in doing so I propose to devote the largest part of my attention to the arguments of Dr. Nansen, which set out most skilfully, and with a wealth of research which it would be difficult to equal, the point of view which is most directly opposed to my own.
Of course in the writings of so primitive and superstitious an age, based upon oral traditions of an even earlier date, we cannot expect to find a standard of historical accuracy equal to that of the present day. The authors, however truthful in intention, had not reached a stage of enlightenment enabling them to winnow fact from myth, both elements appearing to them to be equally credible. As Livy candidly postulated in the case of Rome, some licence must be conceded to antiquity in the dressing-up of early history by an admixture of superstition with the facts it seeks to record. ‘To suppose’, says Dasent, in his admirable introduction to the Njál Saga, ‘that a story told in the eleventh century, when phantoms, and ghosts, and wraiths were implicitly believed in, and when dreams and warnings and tokens were part of every man’s creed, should be wanting in these marks of genuineness, is simply to require that one great proof of its truthfulness should be wanting.’ In other words, one would be entitled to regard the authenticity of any history alleged to be early with great suspicion, if no traces of the supernatural were to be found in it. Such things are to be seen in contemporary chronicles of early times no less than in histories written long after the events described; the evidence might not be sufficient to satisfy a member of the Psychical Research Society, but it was good enough for those who lived in primitive and credulous times. The ghosts and miracles of such history, not in Iceland alone but everywhere, are not conscious inventions on the part of the historian, and do not really damage his credit.
It will be observed, in the narratives here under consideration, that the great bulk of the supernatural happenings is confined to the part dealing with Greenland, the part, that is, which is in the main most conclusively established. Greenland of course was intended to be a permanent colony, and consequently for some time communication, of a more or less intermittent character, was maintained between that country and Scandinavia. As a further result of this protracted occupation of the country, traces were left which remain at the present time. Ruins of houses and churches have been discovered, together with the bones of horses, cattle, and other animals. Had the circumstances been different, had Greenland been merely the object of fleeting visits such as those of the explorers of Wineland, it may well be doubted whether the scepticism with which some have been disposed to regard the alleged exploration of the latter would not have been extended to the former. We should have had our attention drawn to supernatural episodes such as that of the apparitions in Lysefjord (see Thorstein’s voyage), the inclement climate of the locality and the inappropriateness of the name Greenland would have been insisted on, and the mention of horses and cattle would not improbably have been regarded as incredible. But the successful colonization of Greenland is an historical fact, and its story is chronicled in precisely those sagas which are here under consideration with regard to Wineland. It is therefore prima facie unlikely that writings found to be historical so far as it is possible to test them, in one respect should suddenly develop a character mainly fictitious, as alleged by Dr. Nansen and others.
Still it must be admitted that the historians of these early times, in Iceland as elsewhere, were not so scientific in their methods as those of the present day. The word History still retained its derivative kinship with Story; the Muse presiding over this branch of literature had not yet settled down in the humdrum ménage of meticulous professors. Like the classical and scriptural historians, the Icelandic chroniclers considered themselves at liberty to clothe the dry bones of their material, and even to present in the lively form of dialogue speeches of which the substance only could have been known. If, for example, the saga-writer has to chronicle the discovery of wild grapes, it is quite natural for him to assume that a sailor who found the means of intoxication ready to his hand did not neglect his opportunities. This explains the conduct of the German, Tyrker, in the Flatey Book, a great stumbling-block to some commentators. In the same category comes Hauk’s account of the incantations of Thorhall the Hunter; it is an expansion of a stranded-whale episode from the hint given in Thorhall’s verses, and a very careless and inconsistent one at that. Other absurdities can be explained in the same way, and the names of such places as Keelness may have suggested the conflicting stories told to account for them.
Again, if the historian had ready to hand a picturesque anecdote from a different source, but manifestly connected with the principal theme, which could be fitted into the main story, he would have little hesitation in using it, though the unscientific joinery would be often painfully evident. Hake and Hekja, for instance, whether or no they have an historical basis, are manifestly introduced in the wrong place, before any vines had really been discovered, and the limits of the inserted passage are made glaringly apparent by the fact that the last words of the preceding matter are substantially repeated immediately afterwards (‘gerðiz vágskorit lanðit’ ... ‘er varð fjarðskorit’). Such interpolations are frequently of great interest, as affording what really amounts to independent confirmation of the story: they show it to have been widely discussed and accepted at an early date, but they hardly redound to the credit of the first amalgamating editor.
A certain degree of caution is necessary, therefore, in the scientific investigation of this as of all early historical documents. But Dr. Nansen is not content with such reservations as these. He goes so far in the direction of scepticism that the reader wonders in the end that the frail remnants to which he clings are sufficient to hold this author to any belief in the Norse discovery of America. His arguments, if sound, play havoc with the very foundations of the story, and if he sits unmoved among the ruins it is fair to doubt if he will find many to share his attitude, or to trust to the tottering remains. It is advisable, therefore, to examine Dr. Nansen’s arguments rather closely, and to see whether the records which we are investigating are really as unreliable as he has suggested.
It would take a disproportionate allowance of space to deal in detail with all the smaller and more incidental points in the argument. Some of them will be found noticed elsewhere in the present volume, and one or two may here be mentioned as typical. Dr. Nansen suggests, for example, that the statement in the Icelandic Annals for 1121 that Eric, Bishop of Greenland, went out to seek (leita) Wineland, shows that Wineland was at that date not a known but a legendary country, for ‘leita’ can only apply to a search for that the existence of which is undetermined. For instances of a use of the word which entirely upset such an argument it is not necessary to look outside the sagas dealing with the present subject, where we find that Aud the Wealthy ‘fór at leita Íslands’ (went to seek Iceland), at a time when her own brother was already settled there, and long after the foundation of the Icelandic colony.
Again, Dr. Nansen asks us to see ‘an air of myth and invention’ in the numerous Thor-names—Thorvald, Thorhall, Thorstein, Thorfin, &c.—which are undoubtedly to be found in this story. To find, however, such names conferred on men born in heathendom seems to me to prove less than nothing, particularly when we find in the index of names to the Landnámabók no fewer than fourteen pages in double columns devoted to men and women whose names began with Thor.
Of perhaps greater importance is the resemblance to fairy-tale which Dr. Nansen seeks to establish from the frequent occurrence of the number three.[78] This feature is not conspicuous in the Flatey Book version, which gives us no fewer than six voyages—Bjarni, Leif, Thorvald, Thorstein, Karlsefni, and Freydis—while the distances between the lands are not given as equal in all cases. In the companion version it is true that the figure three plays or can be made to play a considerable part, yet it is doubtful if so much use can fairly be made of the point as Dr. Nansen argues. There are three voyages—Leif’s, Thorstein’s, Karlsefni’s; but the fact that the second alone is unsuccessful robs the number of the significance which we should expect in fairy-tale. Karlsefni’s expedition consists of three ships, but this is explained by the circumstance that two of these belonged to the visitors to Greenland, while one was manned by the local contingent. Each ship had two leaders—not one or three—and the crews totalled 160 men, so that the figure three is here only to be found by selection from other quite arbitrary numbers. That three countries are visited is only true if we take the nomenclature of the Flatey Book; in the companion account we may rather say that five places are mentioned—Helluland, Markland, Furdustrands, Straumsfjord, and Hóp. With regard to the number of days’ voyage between the different places visited, no emphasis is laid on the number three; the figure recorded is two, and in some cases a long while. If it is said that two days’ voyage involves an arrival on the third day, then no use can fairly be made of the three days’ search for Thorhall on the island, who was found on the fourth day. Dr. Nansen draws attention to the fact that three meetings with skrælings are recorded, but this is only true of the skrælings at Hóp; it omits the five skrælings found sleeping by the sea, and those whose boys were captured in Markland. If the episode at Hóp is to be treated by itself, it is not a fair argument to say that there were three casualties, for only two men were killed at this time, with four of the savages. If Thorvald’s death at the hands of the uniped is to be included, it would be reasonable to take the total loss to the expedition from all causes, which would comprise Thorhall the Hunter and his eight or nine companions, and Bjarni Grimolfson with about half his crew. Altogether the uniformity of fairy-tale seems conspicuously absent, and the mystic figure, appearing as it does with other numbers which Dr. Nansen ignores, is explicable on quite rational hypotheses.
Turning now to the broader issues of Dr. Nansen’s argument, they may be summarized as follows. The wild grapes and corn are rejected altogether, and traced to legends of the Insulae Fortunatae in Isidore Hispalensis and classical sources. Most of the other salient features of the narrative, the whale, the bird-island, and above all the skrælings, are treated as derived in the main from Irish legend.
The alleged classical and Celtic influences it will be convenient to consider separately.
I may state at the outset that I believe there is something in Dr. Nansen’s argument from the unusual form of the name Vínland hit Goða, which however in its complete form is hardly to be found in the text of the sagas.
I think it quite possible that this is an Icelandic form of the classical Insulae Fortunatae, but I differ from the author under consideration in concluding, for my part, that the Norsemen, or those who recorded their achievements, identified the newly discovered country with these legendary islands, or considered that the name was appropriate, because of the commodities actually found in America.
It seems to me that herein may have lain the great importance attached to the discovery of the grapes, &c., things of which Scandinavians had little knowledge and could make but little use.
That wild grapes, at all events, were discovered I regard as indisputable. Before the introduction of Christian learning into Iceland and Greenland, which could hardly have been far advanced at the time of the actual voyages, it cannot be said that any knowledge of Isidore or the Insulae Fortunatae is likely to have existed in these countries.
Now the verses of Thorhall the Hunter are admitted by all authorities to bear the marks of contemporary composition. And it cannot be disputed that the first of these verses contains an allusion to the discovery of the grape and is very strong evidence that information of this discovery had penetrated to Greenland at a date earlier than that of the voyage in which the author took part. It is hardly possible, in my opinion, to exaggerate the significance of a contemporary composition which says in effect ‘I had been told before I started that I should find vines, but I have not done so’. The latter part of the verse is immaterial, for it may well have been the case, as indeed is stated in the saga, that the vine region had not at this stage been reached by the expedition; the point is that such a region appears to have been discovered by some predecessor of Thorhall, who composed his verse at a period when knowledge of the Fortunate Islands can hardly have penetrated to the Icelandic or Greenland Colonies. It is moreover not without importance that the briefest accounts of Leif’s voyage contain allusions to the discovery of a ‘Wineland’, showing that this was in fact the salient feature of the discovery in the minds of those who heard of it, even if the name was not conferred by the explorers themselves.
Then too we have the evidence of Adam of Bremen, to which allusion has been made in the chapter on sources. Adam, indeed, is likely to have been well acquainted with the classical allusions to the Fortunate Isles, but the same can hardly be predicated of his informant King Svein of Denmark, and the Danes whose ‘certa relatio’ is contrasted by this author, and as I think purposely contrasted, with the ‘fabulosa opinio’ on which the existence of such a country had hitherto rested. Adam’s testimony, dating from about 1070, may therefore be regarded as very strong and practically contemporary corroboration of the discovery of the vines alluded to in these sagas.
Again, it is clear that by the time of Ari the Learned, who was born in 1067, the name Wineland had become definitely attached to a country discovered in the west by the Norse explorers, whose existence and position were well enough known to be understood in a casual allusion. It seems to me in the last degree improbable that, by the time Ari wrote, so large an accretion of legend should have collected round the story of the discovery as to account for the name containing an allusion to wine if grapes had not in fact been discovered there. The style of Ari’s writings, as indeed of all the earlier sagas, is the most independent and natural to be found in the whole of literature; this is due to the absence in these times of almost all external influence. It is clear too that Ari was well qualified for the duties of an historian by a most discriminating judgement as to the merits of his sources of information; he is constantly giving us the names and qualifications of the persons from whom his statements are derived, and their knowledge not infrequently goes back to the period now under consideration; hence it is impossible to ignore the value of a mention of a land of vines or wine in the work of this early and conscientious authority.
But it is further to be observed that if the Norsemen discovered America—and it is generally agreed that they did—the commodities of which the sagas speak were in fact there, waiting to be discovered. Precisely the same two things—wild grapes and cereals—struck almost every one of the rediscoverers and later explorers of this continent. The coincidence of a mention of wild vines and corn in the mythical lands of classical writers is just as strong an argument against the truthfulness of these later explorers as of the Norsemen, yet no one doubts their word, corroborated as it is by the facts known to us at the present day. The whole force of Dr. Nansen’s argument under this head rests upon this coincidence; in fact, he summarizes it in these words: ‘The resemblance between this description (Isidore’s of the Fortunate Isles) and that of Wineland is so close that it cannot be explained away as fortuitous.’[79] Yet the resemblance is just as close between the passage cited and many in the reports of later explorers, where it is quite certainly fortuitous.
A few examples of such passages may here be given:
Cartier.—(Brion Island.) ‘We found it full of goodly trees, meadows, fields of wild corn.’
(North Point, Prince Edward Island.) ‘We landed there this day in four places to see the trees, which are wonderfully fair, &c.,—many others to us unknown.—The lands where there are no woods are very fair, and all so full of wild corn, like rye, that it seems to have been sown and cultivated there.’
(Baye de Chaleur.) ‘Their land is more temperate in heat than the land of Spain—and there is not here any little spot void of woods and made up of sand, which may not be full of wild grain, which has an ear like rye, and the kernel like oats.’
(St. Lawrence River.) ‘On both sides of it we found the fairest and best lands to look at that it may be possible to behold—full of the goodliest trees in the world, and so many vines loaded with grapes along the said river that it seems that they may rather have been planted there by the hand of man than otherwise: but because they are not cultivated nor pruned, the grapes are not so big and sweet as ours.’
Again, ‘Finest trees in the world: to wit, oaks, elms, &c., and, what are better, a great many vines, which had so great abundance of grapes that the crew came aboard all loaded down with them.’
Champlain.—(Richmond Island.) ‘Many vineyards bearing beautiful grapes in their season.’
(Cape Anne.) ‘We found in this place a great many vines, the green grapes on which were a little larger than peas.’
(Gloucester Bay.) ‘We saw some very fine grapes just ripe.’
Charles Leigh.—‘Concerning the nature and fruitfulnesse of Brion’s Island, Isle Blanche, and of Ramea, they do by nature yeeld exceeding plenty of wood, great store of wild corne like barley, &c.’
Hudson.—(Near Cape Cod.) ‘They went on land, and found goodly grapes and rose-trees, and brought them aboard with them.’
Denys.—(St. John’s River.) ‘There is found here also a great quantity of wild grapes.’
It may further be noticed that both Champlain and Cartier conferred on different places the name Île de Bacchus, from the circumstance that grapes were found there. This name, particularly as it is used of different localities, seems quite as much open to Dr. Nansen’s attack as the Norsemen’s Vínland hit Goða. One can imagine the force with which the eminent explorer could point out the manifest connexion with classical sources, and the close resemblance between this nomenclature and that of the legendary islands from which he thinks the Norsemen drew their vines. If then the resemblance in these cases is fortuitous, as it clearly is, what becomes of Dr. Nansen’s argument?
It will be noticed that in the passages above cited not only the vine but the wild corn also makes its appearance. It is clear, therefore, that any argument based on analogy or resemblance to these features of the Fortunate Islands is quite inconclusive. Nevertheless the case for the vines is, it must be admitted, considerably stronger than that for the corn. In the first place, no mention of the latter commodity occurs in the Flatey version, if the reference to ‘a wooden corn-barn’ be explicable on another hypothesis, as I have endeavoured to indicate in treating of Thorvald’s voyage.
In the second place, most of the later explorers seem to have meant by ‘wild corn’ something in the nature of lyme-grass (Arundo arenaria). But there is a difficulty in accepting this plant as the ‘wild wheat’ of the Icelanders, since lyme-grass, under the name of ‘melur’, was well known to this people; a reference to the method employed in comparatively recent times in preparing flour from it will be found in Troil’s Letters on Iceland at page 105. It is true that Professor Fernald of Boston, in his paper on the plants of Wineland, identifies not only the corn, but the vines and the mösur wood, with commodities known to the Norsemen in their own countries, but this has always seemed to me to add to the already insuperable difficulties in the way of accepting his theories, to which I shall have occasion to revert later on.
All the same, I am inclined to think that something in the nature of lyme-grass may be indicated by the wild corn, and if so perhaps we may here trace to some extent the influence of the classical legends on which Dr. Nansen lays stress. One may imagine, without much straining of probability, that on hearing of the vines learned people would ask leading questions as to the existence of corn, and so the lyme-grass, hitherto considered, as we see from the Flatey Book, to be comparatively unimportant, might have reappeared under a new name. One can certainly imagine the schoolmaster, Adam of Bremen, in his cross-examination of the Danes from whom his information was derived, on hearing of the vines, making some inquiry as to the existence of some sort of wild corn, and being quite truthfully told that it did exist.
However this may be, the identification of the wild corn will always be an insoluble problem. The older commentators on these sagas used to consider that maize was indicated, but this is not, properly speaking, a wild plant, and moreover bears singularly little resemblance to any European cereal. The later school mostly identifies the corn of the sagas with wild rice, but this is open to the objection that it is an aquatic plant. On the whole, therefore, while I think the discovery of the vine is indisputable, and was the cause rather than the effect of any trace of the influence of the legends of the Insulae Fortunatae to be met with in the sagas, I confess, in spite of the coincidence of the reports of later explorers, to regarding the corn as a more difficult problem.
In any case it seems to me that the absence of all mention of wild corn in the Flatey Book version has a most significant bearing on Dr. Nansen’s argument. For in practically all references to the Fortunate Islands the corn and the vines are so closely connected that a borrower from such sources could hardly take the one without the other.
E.g. Horace, Epodes, xvi. 41:
and Isidore, Etymologiarum xiv. 6:
‘Fortuitis vitibus iuga collium vestiuntur; ad herbarum vicem messis.’
The existence, therefore, of a circumstantial account of Wineland, which contains no mention of wild corn, makes any derivative connexion between the descriptions of this country and the Insulae Fortunatae, apart from all other difficulties, exceedingly improbable.
When we turn to the other features of the saga, we find Dr. Nansen displaying even greater resource and ingenuity in finding parallels in the folk-lore of other lands. The argument from analogy is proverbially untrustworthy, but it is at the same time rather difficult to combat effectively where, as in the present case, it is impossible to set out the full number of alleged resemblances with which Dr. Nansen’s industry in research has provided him. Samples are open to the charge of unfair selection. I should doubt, for example, whether even Dr. Nansen himself, though he emphasizes the parallel with a marginal heading, can attach any real importance to such an instance as the following:
‘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 Karlsefni found at Hóp in Wineland, which fell into a lake and thence into the sea.... But the river which divided the Terra Repromissionis ... was evidently originally the river of death, Styx or Acheron in Greek mythology (Gjöll in Norse mythology). One might be tempted to suppose that, in the same way as the whole description of Wineland has been dechristianized from the Terra Repromissionis, the realistic, and therefore often rationalizing, Icelanders have transformed the river in the promised land, the ancient river of death, into the stream at Hóp.’[80]
A striking parallel to this parallel leaps at once to the mind of the irreverent. ‘There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but ’tis all one, ’tis so like as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both’ (Henry V, Act IV, sc. vii).
In so far as there were ‘salmons in both’, it must I think be conceded by the impartial reader that Fluellen’s analogy is more striking than Dr. Nansen’s.
Before considering further examples of the resemblances which Dr. Nansen has sought to establish, a few words may be said which are of general application to the whole. As in the instance above cited, Dr. Nansen’s analogies are practically all drawn from the mythical ‘imramha’ or voyages which form a definite class in early Irish literature. This class merges gradually at a later period into vision literature, where a vision of Paradise takes the place of a voyage into the wonderlands of the unseen world. But in its earlier form, with which Dr. Nansen is mainly concerned, the imramh took the form of a kind of Odyssey, in course of which the voyagers discovered many new and wonderful countries. It is manifest therefore that many elements must necessarily be present from which analogies with any voyage of discovery, however genuine, can be deduced. Unless, then, the similarities to be found are more striking than anything which can be explained from these necessary coincidences, we should, I submit, attach but little importance to them. We should remember also that the Icelander, however realistic or rational, is not likely to have been a discriminating borrower or to have rejected fabulous elements quite credible in a superstitious age. Thus we should expect, if extensive loans were taken from a literature exceptionally rich in the monstrous and marvellous, to find at any rate a good many definite instances where these characteristics have been retained without much alteration.
I have said that Irish literature was exceptionally rich in the monstrous and marvellous. This indeed is a characteristic insisted upon by Mr. W. B. Yeats in his admirable introduction to Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne as the great distinction between Celtic and Scandinavian writings. ‘The Irish story-teller’, he says, ‘could not interest himself with an unbroken interest in the way men like himself burned a house or won wives no more wonderful than themselves. His mind constantly escaped out of daily circumstance, as a bough that has been held down by a weak hand suddenly straightens itself out. His imagination was always running off to Tir-nan-Oge, to the land of Promise, which is as near to the country-people of to-day as it was to Cuchulain and his companions.’ ‘Just so,’ says Dr. Nansen, ‘and therefore when the Icelander borrowed he rationalized.’ But had he the necessary critical discrimination to enable him to reject the fabulous? Was he so free from superstitious beliefs as to be able to discredit the mythical? By no means. Nothing is clearer than that he was highly superstitious, believing intensely in ghosts, and portents of all kinds: in fact, he believed in them so thoroughly that they almost ceased to be portentous from the matter-of-fact way in which he thought of them. For all he knew, the wildest flights of the Celtic imagination might be sober truth, and as truth he would have set them down if they had concerned him. But if they were no part of the story he was telling, they could be left out of it.
Now if we examine one of these Irish stories, we shall find the marvellous elements to be the very bones and sinews of the tale. Eliminate these and nothing is left which it would not be easy to parallel from the records of any voyage of discovery. There is nothing characteristic to which any resemblance can be traced, except these clearly mythical features. Take as an example the summary of Maelduin’s voyage given on p. 336 of the first volume of Dr. Nansen’s work. First we hear how ‘swarms of ants, as large as foals, came down to the beach and showed a desire to eat’ the crew and the boat.
‘This land’, says Dr. Nansen, ‘is the parallel to Helluland, where there were a number of Arctic foxes.’ Now there seems to me no reason why an Icelandic writer of the thirteenth century should have discredited the possibility of these Brobdingnagian ants. Yet he describes merely Arctic foxes, animals differing in every way about as widely from these ants as could well be imagined. They are not insects, they are not large, they are not dangerous or formidable. They are animals actually to be found in the northern parts of the American continent, and the locality where they are found is correctly described as a land of rocks, and not a beach at all. Is it credible that the one story, accurate in every particular, could have been derived by the exercise of any amount of imagination from the other? Set your children to rationalize Maelduin’s story, and see if you will get the ants turned to foxes in any single case.
Next we hear of ‘a great lofty island with terraces around it and rows of trees on which there were many large birds’. ‘This island’, says Dr. Nansen, ‘might correspond to the wooded Markland, with its many animals, where Karlsefni and his people killed a bear.’ Then where is the island, or where are the terraces, or the loftiness, or the birds, none of them features, one would have thought, which the most rationalistic need have hesitated to retain? We have, on the contrary, a low-lying land, apparently mainland, wooded indeed, but otherwise unlike in every single particular. Next we read of a sandy island, inhabited by a beast like a horse with dog’s paws and claws. Next a flat island with marks of horses’ hoofs as large as a ship’s sail, nutshells of marvellous size, and traces of human occupation. Next comes a lofty island with a great house sumptuously furnished, into which the waves of the sea threw salmon. Here Dr. Nansen might claim, with Fluellen, ‘salmons in both’, but this has not usually been regarded as a convincing analogy. Lastly we are told of an island encompassed by a great cliff with a single tree growing on it. A branch of this Maelduin caught, and held for three days while sailing by the island, at the end of which time there were three apples at the end of the branch. Not even grapes! I am not sure, in spite of some ambiguous phrases, that in quoting this long passage Dr. Nansen wishes to emphasize many similarities beyond the recurrence of a certain number of periods of three days. But the description is convenient for my purposes as affording a characteristic example of the type of legend from which it is suggested that most of the features of the saga were derived. And I ask myself in vain where is the slightest trace to be found of one story in the other, except that both are voyages of discovery?
Or the case may be put thus: If the fauna and natural products described are merely the monstrosities of Celtic fiction taken with a grain of Icelandic salt, how comes it that they invariably correspond with the actual facts of the countries to which the earliest discoverers of America would most probably have come?
Indisputably this is the case until we come to Straumsfjord, though not much stress can be laid on the circumstance that descriptions so brief and general as those of Helluland and Markland happen to be accurate. The episode of the Irish runners appears indeed to have been inserted out of its proper order, and while not impossible may embody a distinct and less reliable tradition, and in the case of the whale incident the details given by Hauk may be rejected in favour of the simpler account given in the Flatey Book.
But there seems no good reason to doubt that a stranded whale did actually provide food for the explorers, or to regard, as Dr. Nansen does, this incident as borrowed from St. Brendan. The second song of Thorhall the Hunter, generally admitted to be a contemporary production, and anyhow the oldest part of the existing story, makes a plain reference to such an episode when it speaks of ‘boiling whales’. Whales moreover figure extensively in the legends collected from the Algonquins and Micmac Indians of Nova Scotia and New England by C. G. Leland, while Douglas, in his Summary of the planting of the British North American Settlements (1760), refers to whales setting in along shore by Cape Cod, and records that the back of Long Island, where small whales affect the flats, was the first place of the English whale-fishery. To eat whale-meat, even without the pressure of hunger, was quite natural for an Icelander, for Troil writes in his Letters on Iceland (1780), with special reference to the ‘reydur’, the name applied to the whale in question in the Flatey Book, ‘they are all considered very dainty food; and the Icelanders say that the flesh has the taste of beef.’ With regard to the whale incident, therefore—at any rate as recorded in the simpler version—it may be said, first, that it appears to be corroborated by contemporary allusion, secondly that it was perfectly consistent with the local natural history, and lastly that there was at any rate no need for an Icelander to go to Ireland for stories of whales being used as food. Dr. Nansen’s case accordingly breaks down in regard to the whale. The other salient feature mentioned in connexion with Straumsfjord is the bird-island. This Dr. Nansen dismisses as ‘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 in the autumn’. He further denies the existence of any breeding-grounds of importance even so far south as Nova Scotia. Now, in the first place, the statement that the eggs were gathered in the autumn is not the saga-writer’s but Dr. Nansen’s. The expedition left Greenland—according to Hauk—in spring, according to the companion text in summer. We may suppose therefore that the start was made not later than the beginning of May. No prolonged stay was made anywhere until Straumsfjord was reached.
Even therefore if we reject all the distances recorded, and assume a rate of sailing as low as one tylft a day, (75 miles, or little over three knots), it is manifest that wherever we place Straumsfjord the explorers would have arrived there before the end of the nesting-season. And though they stayed in this place for the winter, when they suffered from great scarcity, no mention is made of egg-collecting till the following spring, after the first record of the discovery, immediately upon their arrival in Straumsfjord.
Next, although the statement ‘a man’s feet could hardly come down between the eggs’ is at first sight startling, it is an easy task to find parallel passages among the later records of exploration in or about these latitudes.
For example, Charles Leigh (in Hakluyt’s Voyages) says of the Islands of Birds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that they ‘are sandy red, but with the multitude of birds upon them they looke white. The birds sit there as thicke as stones lie in a paved street.’
The same locality is described in language almost equally striking by Jacques Cartier: ‘These Islands are as full of birds as a field is of grass, which nest within these islands.’
If Dr. Nansen objects that the islands here alluded to are not quite so far south as Nova Scotia, where he denies the existence of large breeding-places, we may refer him to Nicholas Denys, who writes of an island off this coast which has been identified with Sambro Island, near Halifax:
‘I was once there with a boat, at the time when the birds make their nests. We found so great an abundance of all the kinds I have named that all my crew and myself, having cut clubs for ourselves, killed so great a number, as well of young as of their fathers and mothers, which were very sluggish in rising from their nests, that we were unable to carry them all away. And aside from these the number of those which were spared and which rose into the air made a cloud so thick that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate through it.’
Or again take Champlain (islands near Cape Sable, Nova Scotia):
‘Thence we went to Cormorant island, a league distant, so called from the infinite number of cormorants found there, of whose eggs we collected a cask full.... At the two other islands there is such an abundance of birds of different sorts, that one could not imagine it, if he had not seen them.’
Lastly we may turn to more modern times and still more southerly latitudes, and refer to the ‘hundreds of thousands’ of breeding sea-birds observed on and about Muskegat Island as lately as 1870.[81] This after centuries of indiscriminate plunder by the hand of man may well lead us to accept as practically literal fact the birds’ nests of Straumsey, wherever we may feel disposed to locate this island. In any case it would appear rash to dismiss this detail as a purely northern feature, and still more far-fetched to trace, as Dr. Nansen does, a possible connexion between these eggs and the red and white ‘scaltae’ which covered the anchorite’s island in the legend of St. Brendan.[82]
Among the remaining descriptions of the fauna of Wineland there does not appear to be much calling for any comment. As to the halibut—or ‘holy fish’—taken in pits dug at the tide-mark, it seems to me most likely that the fish here alluded to was the American plaice or chicken halibut. Of these it is said in Goode’s American Fishes (p. 316): ‘Very shoal water seems to be particularly attractive, and they are often found at the water’s edge, embedded in the sand, with only their eyes in view.’ Cf. the tract New English Canaan:[83] ‘There are excellent plaice and easily taken. They (at flowing water) do almost come ashore, so that one may step but half a foot deep, and prick them up on the sands.’
In any case, all Dr. Nansen’s researches have failed to provide him with a mythical source for this feature.
We find, in short, wherever we look, in place of the wild absurdities of Irish legend, sober descriptions of places with their fauna and flora which are perfectly natural. What is more important, we do not find in these descriptions the sort of thing likely to occur to an Icelander or Greenlander, who was rationalizing a legend to make it fit the circumstances to which he was accustomed. Apart from the wine and corn, we have a temperate climate with woods and large trees, low shores and sandy beaches; except for the introduction of glaciers into Helluland in the Flatey Book, which may be an embroidery from local sources to emphasize the desolate character of the landscape, we trace a manifest attempt throughout to describe conditions, natural enough to us, but quite unlike anything characteristic of Iceland or Greenland. With regard to the vines in particular, one can see that the nature of these things was imperfectly understood by the saga-writers, so unlike were they to anything with which they were acquainted at home. The most conspicuous example of the description of something utterly foreign to Icelandic conceptions is, however, the account of the ‘Skrælings’ or savages. These, however, are so important an item in the consideration of the question that they must be allotted a chapter to themselves.