IN NORTHERN MISTS 



blood with it. This points to his having found in Norway ideas about the 

 Skraelings as supernatural beings of a similar kind to those already mentioned. 



In a letter to Pope Nicholas V. (1447-1455) it is related [cf. G. Storm, 1899]: 

 " And when one travels west [from Norway] towards the mountains of this 

 country [Greenland], there dwell there Pygmies in the shape of little men, 

 only a cubit high. When they see human beings they collect and hide them- 

 selves in the caves of the country like a swarm of ants. One cannot conquer 

 them; for they do not wait until they are attacked. They live on raw meat 

 and boiled fish." This resembles what is said about the Pygmies in Clavus, 

 but as additional information is given here, it is probable that both Clavus and 

 the author of this letter, and perhaps also Beheim, have derived their state- 

 ments from older sources, perhaps of the fourteenth century, which either 

 were Norwegian or had obtained information from Norway. The description 

 of the Pygmies and how they fly on the approach of strangers points to knowl- 

 edge of the Eskimo and their habits. The idea about caves is, perhaps, more 

 likely to be connected with pixies and fairies, who lived in mounds and caves 

 (cf. pp. 15, 76); but reports of the half-underground Eskimo houses may also 

 have had something to do with it. It is possible that the common source may 

 be the lost work of the English author, Nicholas of Lynn, who traveled in 

 Norway in the fourteenth century (cf. chapter xii. on Martin Behaim's globe). 



Archbishop Erik Walkendorf (in his description of Finmark of about 1520) 

 has a similar allusion to the Eskimo, which may well have the same origin. 

 He transfers them to the north-north-west of Finmark, like the Pygmies on 

 Claudius Clavus' map. He says: "Finmark has on its north-north-west a 

 people of short and small stature, namely a cubit and a half, who are com- 

 monly called ' Skraelinger ' ; they are an unwarlike people, for fifteen of them 

 do not dare to approach one Christian or Russian either for combat or parley. 

 They live in underground houses, so that one can neither examine them nor 

 capture them. They worship gods" [Walkendorf, 1902, p. i2].i 



We thus see that while Icelandic literature, subsequent to 

 Are Frode, affords scarcely any information about the Green- 

 land Skraelings themselves, it is a Norwegian author, as early 

 as the thirteenth century, who makes the first statements about 

 them and their culture ; and a Danish author of the fifteenth cen- 

 tury, whose statements may originally have been derived from 



1 Jacob Ziegler (circa 1532), who probably made use of statements from 

 Walkendorf, confuses the Norsemen and Eskimo in Greenland together into 

 one people, who breed cattle, have two episcopal churches, etc.; but "on ac- 

 count of the distance and the difficulty of the voyage the people have almost 

 reverted to heathendom, and are . . . especially addicted to the arts of 

 magic, like the Lapps. . . ." They use light boats of hides, with which 

 they attack other ships [cf. Gronl. hist. Mind., iii. p. 499]. 



86 



