IN NORTHERN MISTS 



from old German " sconi," or " schon " ; Greenland comes 

 from the inhabitants being bluish-green in the face, etc.). 

 An example from a country lying near Denmark, which 

 appears to me even more striking than those given by 

 Soderberg, is Adam's explanation of Kvaenland as the Land of 

 Women (cf. Vol. I, pp. i86 f., 383), the Wizzi as white people, or 

 Albanians, the Huns as dogs, etc. Soderberg has difficulty 

 in explaining the statement about the unsown corn in Wine- 

 land; but if he had noticed Isidore's description of the 

 Insulas Fortunatae with the self-grown vine and the wild- 

 growing corn, he would have found a perfectly natural 

 explanation of this also. If Adam had misunderstood a 

 "Vinland" (= the grass-land), and then perhaps Finland (Fin- 

 mark, cf. Vol. I, p. 382), as meaning the land of wine, it would 

 be just in his spirit to transfer thither Isidore's description of 

 the Insulae Fortunatae; a parallel case is that, in interpreting 

 Kvaenland as Womanland, he transfers thither the myth of the 

 Amazons and its fables, and this in spite of its being a country 

 on the Baltic about which it must have been comparatively 

 easy for him to obtain information. In the same way he 

 transfers to the " island " of Halagland, mentioned imme- 

 diately before Wineland, an erroneous account of the mid- 

 night sun and the winter night taken from older writers (cf. 

 Vol. I, p. 194, note 2). But one reason for thinking that "Vin- 

 land " really meant the land of wine as early as that time is 

 the circumstance put forward above (Vol. I, p. 365), that at 

 about the same time there occurs a Grape-island in the " Navi- 

 gatio Brandani." 



Professor Soderberg then goes through the Icelandic 

 accounts of Wineland, and points out, in the same way as 

 has been done in this chapter, that the oldest authorities 

 have nothing remarkable to report about the country, and do 

 not mention wine there, and he rightly lays stress on this 

 being particularly significant in the case of Snorre Sturlason, 



"knowing as we do how prone Snorre is to digress from his proper subject, 

 when he has anything really interesting to communicate. The reason must be 

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