IN NORTHERN MISTS 



Skraelings, like a sheep's paunch, which is flung over them 

 from a pole and makes an ugly noise when it falls, is 

 obvious; but at the same time it looks as though this 

 incident of the Irish myth — which is an echo of the classical 

 Cyclops of the " ^neid " and " Odyssey " (cf. Polyphemus and the 

 Cyclops), and the great stones that were thrown at Odysseus 

 — had been " modernized " by the saga writer who has 

 transferred mediaeval European catapults and explosives to the 

 Indians. 



The curious expression — used when the Skraelings come 

 in the spring for the second time to Karlsevne's settlement — 

 that they came rowing in a multitude of hide canoes " as many 

 as though [the sea] had been sown with coal before the Hop " 

 (i.e., the bay), seems to find its explanation in s,ome tale like 

 that of the " Imram Brenaind " [cf. Zimmer, 1889, p. 138], where 

 Brandan and his companions come to a small deserted land, 

 and the harbor they entered was immediately filled with " de- 

 mons in the form of pygmies and dwarfs, who were as black 

 as coal." 



The " hellustein " (flat stone) which lay fixed in the skull of 

 the fallen Thorbrand Snorrason is a curious missile, and re- 

 minds one of trolls (cf. Arab myth, chapter xiii.). Features 

 such as that of the Skraelings being supposed to know that white 

 shields meant peace and red ones war have an altogether Euro- 

 pean effect.^ 



1 The poles that are swung the way of the sun or against it seem incompre- 

 hensible, and something of the meaning must have been lost in the transfer- 

 ence of this incident from the tale from which it was borrowed. It may be 

 derived from the kayak paddles of the Greenland Eskimo, which at a distance 

 look like poles being swung, with or against the sun according to the side they 

 are seen from. It may be mentioned that in the oldest MS. of Eric the Red's 

 Saga, in the Hauksbok, the reading is not " trjanum " as in the later MS., but 

 " triom " and " trionum." Now " trionum " or " trjonum " might mean either 

 poles or snouts, and one would then be led to think of the Indians' animal 

 masks, or again, of the trolls' long snouts or animal trunks, which we find 

 again in fossil forms in the fairy-tales, and even in games that are still pre- 

 served in Gudbrandsdal, under the name of " trono " (the regular Gudbrands- 

 dal phonetic development of Old Norse " trjona "), where people cover their 

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