IN NORTHERN MISTS 



A valuable piece of evidence of the Norsemen having 



early had intercourse with the Skraelings in Greenland is a 



little carved walrus, of walrus ivory, which was found during 



excavations on the site of a house in Bergen, and which 



appears to be of Eskimo workmanship.^ Unfortunately the 



age of the find has not been determined, nor has it been 



recorded at what depth it lay; but as it was amongst the 



deepest finds " right down in the very foundations," and so 



far as can be made out from the description, 



much deeper than " a burnt layer, which lay 



under the remains of the fire of 141 3," this 



walrus may be of the twelfth, or, at the latest, 



of the thirteenth century. It might, no doubt, 



have been accidentally found by Greenlanders 



in a grave or dwelling-site of Skraelings, and 



afterwards accidentally found on the site of 



this house in Bergen; but this is assuming a 



good many accidents, and it is most natural 



r T7 1 -^^ to suppose that the Greenlanders obtained it 

 of tiSkimo ^'^ 



work, of the from the Skfaslings themselves, and that it is 

 twelfth cen- thus an evidence of intercourse with the latter 

 * " ^ y <•>' at that time. 



found on the ^ , .,.,,«,,. 



site of a house ^^ IS strikmg that the Skraehngs are scarcely 



inBergen ever mentioned in the descriptions of the 

 [after Koren- Norsemen in Greenland in the Icelandic saga 

 Wiberg, 1908] li^ej-ature, and that it is only in one or two 

 places that Greenland Skr^lings are mentioned in passing 

 in Icelandic narratives; but at the same time there are 

 detailed descriptions of both peaceful and warlike encounters 

 with the Skraelings in Wineland, and also in Markland (see 

 Vol. I, pp. 327 f.). This is like what we found in Are 

 Frode. The explanation must be that, while the saga teller 

 could bring out the distant Skraelings of Wineland in large 



1 Cf. Christian Koren-Wiberg: Bidrag til Bergens Kulturhistorie, Ber- 

 gen, 1908, pp. 151 f. I owe it to Prof. A. Bugge that my attention was drawn 

 to this interesting find. 

 80 



