ESKIMO AND SKR^LING 



of the western countries, with whom the Greenlanders may have had more in- 

 tercourse than appears from these tales; but even so we cannot in any case 

 draw any conclusions from it with regard to the distribution of Indians or 

 Eskimo on the east coast of America at that period. If it could really be 

 established, as it cannot, that the Wineland Skraelings of the saga were Es- 

 kimo, then this alone would lead to the conclusion that the Greenlanders on 

 their voyages had not been so far south as Nova Scotia, but at the farthest 

 had probably reached the north of Newfoundland. If the authors mentioned 

 have thought themselves justified in concluding that the Greenlanders found 

 Eskimo in Nova Scotia, because the natives of Wineland are called Skraelings 

 and are consequently assumed to be the same people with the same culture as 

 those in Greenland, they cannot have been fully alive to the difficulty involved 

 in its being impossible for the Skraelings of Nova Scotia, with its entirely dif- 

 ferent natural conditions, to have had the same arctic whaling and sealing cul- 

 ture as the Skraelings of Greenland, even if they belonged to the same race. 

 For we should then have to believe that they had reached Nova Scotia from 

 the north with their culture, which was adapted for arctic conditions. They 

 would have to have dislodged the tribes of Indians who inhabited these south- 

 ern regions before their arrival, although they possessed a culture which un- 

 der the local conditions was inferior, and were doubtless also inferior in 

 warlike qualities. In addition, these Eskimo, with their Eskimo culture, in 

 Nova Scotia must have completely disappeared again before the country was 

 rediscovered 500 years later, when it was solely inhabited by Indian tribes. 

 We are asked to accept these various improbabilities chiefly because the word 

 " Skrasling " — which, it must be remembered, was not originally an ethnogra- 

 phical name, but meant dwarf or pixy — is used of the people both in Wine- 

 land and Greenland, because the word " keiplabrot " is used by Are Frode (see 

 Vol. I, p. 260), and because in two passages of Eric the Red's Saga, written 

 down about 300 years after the " events," the word " huSkeipr " is used of the 

 Skraelings' boats in Wineland, while in four passages they are called " skip " 

 (i.e., vessel), and in another merely " keipana." It appears to me that this is 

 attributing to the ancient Icelanders an ethnographical interest which Ice- 

 landic literature proves to have been just what they lacked (see above, pp. 

 81 f.). In any case there is no justification for regarding these tardily re- 

 corded traditions as ethnographical essays, every word of which has a scien- 

 tific meaning; and for that they contain far too many obviously mythical 

 features. It is not apparent that any of the authors mentioned has decided 

 of what kind of hide the Skraelings in southern Nova Scotia, or even farther 

 south ("where no snow fell"), should have made their hide-boats. 



Opportunities of supporting themselves by sealing cannot have existed on 

 these southern coasts. The species of seal which form the Eskimo's indispens- 

 able condition of life farther north are no longer found. The only species of 

 seal which occurs frequently on the coast of Nova Scotia is, as Professor 

 Robert Collett informs me, the gray seal (Halichoerus gryphus), which is also 

 found on the coast of Norway and is caught, amongst other places, on the Fro 

 Islands. But this seal cannot have been present in sufficiently large numbers 



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