ESKIMO AND SKR^LING 



a half-supernatural people, and had various magical properties 

 attributed to them. 



From the statement quoted earlier from Are Frode's 

 Islendingabok (circa 1130) it appears that the Skraelings, or 

 Eskimo, had been in South Greenland before Eric the 

 Red and his men, and that the latter found dwelling-sites 

 and other traces of them, from which they could tell that the 

 same kind of people had been there who "inhabited Wine- 

 land and whom the Greenlanders call Skraelings [Vinland 

 hefer bygt oc Gronlendingar calla Scrcelinga]." These 

 words of Are have generally been understood to imply that 

 he did not know of any meeting of Norsemen and Skraelings 

 in Greenland, but only in Wineland, and that consequently 

 it must have been after his time that the Norsemen 

 encountered the Eskimo in Greenland. I am unable to 

 read Are's meaning in this way. He uses the present tense: 

 " calla," and what one " calls Skraelings " must presumably 

 be a people one knows, and not one that one's ancestors had 

 met with more than a hundred years ago. In that case we 

 should rather expect it to be those ancestors who " called " 

 them by this nickname.^ I have already suggested (p. 16) 

 the possibility of a connection between this statement and 

 the view of the Skraelings as trolls; but we have, besides, a 

 remarkable parallel to Are's whole account of the first coming 

 of the Icelanders to Greenland and the natives there in his 

 account of the Norwegians' first settlement of Iceland, where 

 he says that there were Christian men before they came, 

 "whom the Norwegians call [calla] papar " (i.e., priests). 

 They left behind them traces " from which it could be seen 

 that they were Irishmen." From these words it might be 

 concluded, with as much justification as from the statement 

 about the traces of Skraelings, that the newcomers did not 



1 If it was the tradition of Karlsevne's encounter with the Skraslings that 

 was referred to, then of course neither he nor the greater part of his men were 

 Greenlanders, but Icelanders, so that it might equally well have been said that 

 the Icelanders called them Skraelings. 



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