34 Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
mottled grain, the word being closely related to the German Masern 
(= measles) and the English measles."! It does not refer to any 
definite species or genus of trees. The “bird's eye maple” furnished 
the ground for the hypothesis that it was a species of maple the 
Norsemen referred to and credit is due Fernald for emphasizing a 
more probable identity with the white birch, but the fact must be 
borne in mind that the word permits no such certain identification 
as to contribute in any way to the determination of the point on the 
American coast reached by the Norsemen, but on the contrary the 
identity of the tree furnishing the mosurr might depend upon the 
latitude in which it was found. 
The fundamental problem, that of the value of the sources, Pro- 
fessor Fernald has naturally left untouched. The Old Icelandic sagas 
exist in all degrees of historical trustworthiness from that of very 
reliable contemporary or slightly later biography or history to the 
wildest fiction. In point of subject-matter, style and historical re- 
liability they admit of classification into a number of groups. Most 
reliable generally are the Konunga sggur or sagas of the (mostly Nor- 
wegian) kings, with which a few other historical works dealing with 
Iceland, etc. may be included. The authors of these are in many 
cases known. The Íslendinga sogur, to which the most considerable 
sources for the Norse discovery of America belong, differ among other 
things in being all of unknown authorship. They were written mostly 
in the 13th century and show stylistically the characteristics of literary 
rather than primarily historical work.? They deal for the most part 
with Icelandic (in our case Greenlandic) personages of the 9th and 
10th centuries: i. e. two to three centuries intervene between the 
events and the written record, or rather elaboration of them. "The 
materials that the authors had to use were mostly oral traditions two 
or three hundred years old. That these literarily remarkable produc- 
tions are not of the nature of historical documents must be clear enough 
from the nature of the case. In this particular instance a check 
upon their reliability is offered in the fact that two such records of 
the oral tradition of the Norse discovery of America are preserved: 
the so-called Eiriks saga rauða and the Grænlendinga Páttr. Under 
the circumstances only the features in which both agree could be 
1 The word is entirely correctly explained by Westman. Cf. also Grónlands his- 
toriske Mindesmeerker, i, 279 f. 1838. 
2 Of. e. g. Neckel in Mitteilungen der schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, 
xi, 38ff. 1909. 
