IN NORTHERN MISTS 



of them appears strange. Through finding the connection 

 between Wineland the Good and the Fortunate Isles, and 

 between the latter again and the lands of the departed, the 

 ** huldrelands," fairy-lands, and the lands of the Irish " sid," 

 I arrived at the kindred idea that perhaps Skraeling was 

 originally a name for those gnomes or brownies or mythical 

 beings, and that it was these that Are Frode meant by the 



people who " were 

 inhabiting Wineland '* 

 — and further, that 

 when the Icelanders 

 in Greenland found 

 a strange, small, 

 f orei gn-looking 

 people, with hide 

 canoes and imple- 

 ments of stone, bone, 

 and wood, which also 

 looked strange to 

 them, they naturally 

 regarded them as 

 these same Skrael- 

 ings; and then they 

 people (Eskimo, and 

 It agrees with 



Eskimos cutting up a whale. Wood-cut from 



Greenland, illustrating a fairy tale; drawn 



and engraved by a native 



may afterwards have found similar 



perhaps Indians) on the coast of America. 



the view of the Skraelings as a small people that elves and 



brownies in Norway were small, often only two or three 



feet high, and that the underground or huldrefolk in 



Skane were called "pysslingar" (dwarfs). This idea that 



myths of the outskirts of the inhabited world that have here been at work." In 

 a later work [1890, p. 357] he says that it is " certain enough that in the Mid- 

 dle Ages the Scandinavians knew no other people in Greenland and the Amer- 

 ican countries lying to the south of it than ' Skrslings,' who were not ac- 

 counted real human beings and whose name was always translated into Latin 

 as ' Pygmaei.' " If Storm had remarked the connection between the classical 

 and Irish legends and the ideas about Wineland, the further step of regarding 

 the Skraslings as originally mythical beings would have been natural. 

 12 



