WINELAND THE GOOD 



The surest historical evidence that voyages were made to 

 America from Greenland is the chance statement, referred to 

 later, in the Icelandic annals: that in 1347 ^ ship from 

 Greenland bound for Markland was driven by storms to 

 Iceland. This reveals the fact that, occasionally at any 

 rate, this voyage was made; and if the sagas about the 

 Wineland voyages must be regarded as romances, or as a 

 kind of legendary poetry — which, therefore, made no attempt 

 whatever to give a historical exposition of the communication 

 with the countries to the south-west — then many more 

 voyages may have been made thither than the sagas had 

 use for. A prominent feature of the different tales is that of 

 the Greenlanders bringing timber from thence; this appears 

 already in the story of Leif's discovery of the country — he 

 found various kinds of trees and " m9surr," and brought 

 them home with him — and still more in the tales of the 

 Flateyjarbok, where on each voyage it is expressly stated 

 that they felled timber to load their ships, as though that 

 were their chief object. In the Icelandic geography men- 

 tioned on p. I, there is an addition, probably of late date: 



". . . It is said that Thorfinn Karlsevne felled wood [in Markland?] for 

 a * husa-snotra,' and then went on to seek for Wineland the Good, and arrived 

 where this land was thought to be, but was not able to explore it, and did not 

 settle there. . . ."1 



In the Flateyjarbok's " Gronlendinga-^attr " it is stated 

 that Karlsevne, in Wineland, cut down timber to load his 



1 Cf . Gronl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 220; Storm, 1887, p. 12. "Husa-snotra" is 

 explained as a vane or similar decoration on the gable of a house or a ship's 

 stem [cf. V. GuSmundsson, i88g, pp. 158 f.]. The statement given above shows 

 that a " husa-snotra " was something to which great importance was attached, 

 otherwise attention would not have been called to it in this way. And in the 

 " Gronlendinga-J'attr " [Gr. hist. Mind., i. p. 254] we read that Karlsevne, when 

 he was in Norway, would not sell his " husa-snotra " (made of " mausurr " from 

 Wineland) to the German from Bremen, until the latter offered him half a mark 

 of gold for it. One might suppose that this ornament (vane-staff) on the prow 

 of a ship or the gable of a house was connected with religious or superstitious 

 ideas of some kind, like the posts of the high seat within the house, or the 

 totem poles of the North American Indians, which stood before the house. 



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