IN NORTHERN MISTS 



towards Wineland, up into the ice in the uninhabited country. Evil can take 

 away luck, so that one dies early." 



Bugge regards this reading of this somewhat difficult 

 inscription as doubtful; but if it is correct, this verse may 

 be part of an inscription cut upon one or more stones in mem- 

 ory of a young man (or perhaps several) from Ringerike, who 

 took part in an expedition by sea. According to his explana- 

 tion, they were then driven far out into the ocean in the direc- 

 tion of Wineland, and were lost, perhaps in the ice on the east 

 coast of Greenland (which in the sagas is generally called the 

 uninhabited country, " ubygS ") ; they abandoned their ship and 

 had to take to the drift-ice. He (or they) to whom the inscrip- 

 tion refers thereby met his death at an early age, while at any 

 rate some one must have made his way back and brought the 

 tale of the voyage. Probably there was a commencement of 

 the inscription, now lost, giving the name of the young man, 

 who must certainly have been of good birth; for otherwise, as 

 Bugge points out, a memorial with an inscription in verse would 

 hardly have been raised to him. He or his family belonged to 

 Ringerike, and to the neighborhood in which the stone was 

 put up. 



The form of the runes makes it probable, according to 

 Bugge, that the inscription dates from the eleventh century, 

 and perhaps from the period between looo and 1050; 

 scarcely before that, though it may be later. The inscription 

 would thus acquire a value as possibly the earliest document 

 in which Wineland is mentioned. What kind of expedition 

 the inscription records we cannot tell; there is nothing to 

 show that it was a real Wineland voyage; the words seem 

 rather to point to their having been driven against their will 

 out to sea in the direction of " Wineland," whether we are to 

 regard this as the Wineland of myth or as a historical 

 country; it might well be used figuratively in an epitaph 

 to describe more graphically how far they went from the 

 beaten track. It may equally well have been on a voyage 

 to Ireland, the Faroes, Iceland, or merely to the north of 

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