32 | Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
it could readily be granted. What the sagas say of the Vínland 
grapes leaves no doubt upon this point, in fact the relatively less 
credible one has felt obliged to introduce a southern European with 
the suggestive name of Tyrkir as a person competent to identify 
grapes. One might for example conceive of them as finding a wild 
plum or cherry (Prunus sp.) which would at least account for their 
loading up their boats with the wood of the grape. There is, so far 
as I can see, absolutely nothing gained by Fernald's attempt to find 
a new interpretation for the plant giving its name to the country. 
Such arguments as that a Scandinavian vindrufea (= grape) render 
it unlikely that the Norsemen would have called grapes vinber merely 
show upon what unfamiliar ground Professor Fernald is treading, as, 
if one choose to neglect the occurrence side by side of the correspond- 
ing Weinbeere and Weintraube in modern German, vindrufra is only a 
late Swedish word (it occurs also in Danish as vindrue = grape), the 
latter part of which (or for that matter the whole combination) is 
borrowed from the Low German, as the form of the word sufficiently 
shows. One of Fernald’s numerous footnotes (6 on page 21) leaves 
one similarly puzzled both as to meaning and application until one 
consults the reference to DeCandolle and finds it taken over intact, 
apparently without an exact understanding of its content. Ribs and 
resp are simply two of the distortions of the mediaeval Latin ribes 
found in recent Scandinavian (perhaps brought in with a cultivated 
strain of the plants) and not at all old Scandinavian words.’ It is 
peculiar that the wild currants of northern Europe seem to have had 
no common Old Germanic or even common Scandinavian name.’ 
For the interesting facts about the bringing of the plant-name ribes 
to Europe by the Arabs see Fischer-Benzon, Botanisches Central- 
blatt, Ixiv, 371ff., 401ff. 1895. Fernald has himself been unable to 
find any evidence that the mountain-cranberry has ever been called 
vinber in any part of Scandinavia. 
The conclusion that the “self-sown wheat” found was the Lyme- 
grass (Elymus arenarius) may readily seem more plausible than that 
it was the wild rice, but even then it is difficult to see why the Norse- 
men should have noted as remarkable the occurrence of a plant with 
which they were entirely familiar at home and why they should 
1 Cf. for example Falk & Torp, loc. cit., 158. 
? Cf. Falk & Torp, loc. cit., 896. . 
3 Cf. Hoops, Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, i, 204. 1912. 
