18 Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
sufficient to give a portion of the evidence in regard to the “ Grape," 
the “Wheat,” and the *mosurr" wood; and to state that the further 
details which have been assembled in regard to these, as well as the 
bear, strange whale, Skrellings, ice-capped mountains, and other 
features, which define the natural and physical characteristics of these, 
the first regions of America to be described, will, as soon as possible, 
be presented in a more extended work now in preparation. 
In approaching a subject, in many of its details so foreign to the 
ordinary field of the writer's studies, he should explain, that, in matters 
pertaining to the original statements of the sagas, he has depended upon 
the phototype reproductions of the texts and the translations published 
by Reeves,’ which have been said to be, “as far as the Scandinavian 
sources of information are concerned, the final word." In the trans- 
lation of the Scandinavian and some other passages he has had the 
generous assistance of Professor W. H. Schofield and in the Latin 
passages of Professor E. K. Rand; and in the proof-reading he has 
been assisted by Miss Mary A. Day, Librarian of the Gray Her- 
barium. 
The portions of the original Icelandic texts, which have brought 
the Grape so prominently into the discussion of Wineland the Good, 
are frequent statements that the Norsemen found the “vinber,” which 
grew “wherever there was hilly ground” and which, according to one 
version of the story, were so abundant “that their after-boat was filled 
with ‘vinberjum’....and when spring came, they made their ship 
ready, and sailed away; and from its products Leif gave the land a 
name, and called it Wineland.”  " Vínber," literally wine-berry, has 
very naturally been accepted by students of the sagas as “Grape”; 
and in a work no less authoritative than the Century Dictionary do 
we find under BERRY, that the Old Saxon “winbert = A. S. winberie, 
'wine-berry, grape." In line with this general interpretation, Vínland 
has been located at various points on the coast of southern New Eng- 
land and Nova Scotia, near the northern limits of the range of Wild 
Grapes. Storm, in urging the claims of Nova Scotia, cites the finding 
of Wild Grapes by Cartier on the Isle of Orleans in Quebec [300 miles 
from the nearest point in Nova Scotia] and by the later French ex- 
plorers, in 1607, on the St. John River in New Brunswick; but “on 
Arthur Middleton Reeves, The Finding of Wineland the Good. The History of 
the Icelandic Discovery of America edited and translated from the earliest Records. 
With Phototype Plates of the Vellum Mss. of the Sagas. London, 1890. 
