﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 27 



Two native boys, captured in Markland, an American region, 

 according to the Saga of Eric the Red and the Saga of Thorfinn 

 Karlsefni, told, about the year 1006 of a country beyond their own, 

 where people wore white garments, carried rags on poles and shouted ; 

 from which it was inferred that this must be the already known or 

 rumored White Men's Land, 1 sometimes called Great Ireland. We 

 may suppose that these little prisoners were merely echoing what they 

 heard from the Norsemen around them, to find favor with their 

 masters. But this would equally prove what was then the prevailing 

 tradition. 



We know that the early Irish Church was the lamp of faith for 

 all the west ; that St. Patrick's conquest of the island for Christ 

 aroused in it a wave of militant Christian emotion, becoming in some 

 souls an eagerness to spread the gospel, in others a wild hunger for 

 solitude, where life might be as nearly as possible an unbroken trance 

 of religious ecstasy ; and that these combined motives drove little 

 shiploads of religious mariners out in all directions with most aban- 

 doned recklessness. The Norse rovers were counted the hardiest 

 and boldest men of all the world, but they could find no place where 

 these Irish had not been before them. It was so in the Orkneys, in 

 the Faroes, and in Iceland — and their holy-isle off shore from this 

 latter home is still named for them. A well-known passage of the 

 Landnamabok records their withdrawal, apparently between the 

 years 885 and 1000, leaving Irish books, bells, and croziers behind 

 them. But that is not their earliest. Dicuil, the monastic Irish geo- 

 grapher, mentions meeting, a hundred years before, one of the 

 brethren who had been to Iceland ; also there are items, of uncertain 

 value, in various quarters concerning an alleged Irish settlement on 

 that island a century earlier still. 



In view of what they really achieved, their known fearlessness and 

 very special impulsion, why should it be incredible that in one thing 

 more they should outstrip all others, reaching at some point the main- 

 land of America, though they might not be able to return, and their 

 settlement must die out if reinforcements failed? If their supplanters 

 in Iceland, the Norsemen, had not recorded the presence there of these 

 ecclesiastical Irishmen it is likely that we should be debating it to-day, 

 though it continued so long. 



In the beginning of the Heimskringla 2 — " one of the great history 

 books of the world," as Dr. Fiske has called it, in a portion recognized 



1 See Dr. Brinton's early article in Historic Mag., vol. 9. p. 364 (1865). iden- 

 tifying with Carolina by reason of Albinos. 



2 Laing's translation of Heimskringla, vol. 1, p. 216. 



