﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK 53 



shore of the mild Acadian Bay, a few slippery coincidences in names, 

 customs, etc., evidence to which ethnologists now attach little value, 

 have been gathered by Bishop Howley a and put forward with a 

 certain confidence in his Vinland Vindicated. 



Labrador needs thorough searching. So far, it offers only certain 

 small stone structures, 2 perhaps of native origin, and an Eskimo 

 legend, quoted by Packard 3 from an earlier writer, concerning a 

 race of invulnerable giants, roundly identified with mail-clad Norse- 

 man by these white recorders. But Chambers, finding the same myth 

 among the Iroquois, fastens it in The Maid at Arms on wandering 

 Spaniards of De Soto's time. Yet further, we learn that other tribes 

 know these tall, hard-shelled warriors in quarters beyond the reach of 

 mailed Europeans. Perhaps the Norse Giants should be set aside for 

 the present as fancy-figures ; it is so natural for primitive ill-defended 

 people to thrill over such nightmares, which may issue out of the 

 dark at any moment and do what they will with you, themselves 

 unharmed. Something of it, indeed, is in or behind every well 

 created ghost-story. 



The deep indentation of Hudson Bay offers perhaps the only 

 remaining field — hardly a hopeful one. The Kensington rune stone 4 

 fills it, having a legend all its own, and is now urged with determina- 

 tion by certain Minnesota advocates, geographical and linguistic, 

 who certainly claim consideration. This relic was found in the 

 interior of Minnesota by a Swedish farmer in a Swedish settlement, 

 and it seems to be admitted that the inscription itself has a Swedish 

 cast. These facts, added to the remoteness of the location and 

 the obstacles in the way, surely raise a presumption against it. 

 There is an attempt to overcome this objection by the statement that 

 the stone was under and among the roots of a tree, estimated by 

 observers to be forty years old, which would carry it well beyond 

 the period of the modern Swedes in that locality. But any rapidly- 

 growing tree, such as our tulip tree, or most other indigenous 

 " poplars," will make a greater growth than Mr. Holand's several 

 statements call for in much less time than that. A tulip tree near my 

 home which had not yet sprung up from the seed, in August, 1897, 

 showed in September, 1910, thirty-eight inches of measured circum- 



X M. F. Howley: Vinland Vindicated. Trans. Roj'al Soc. Can., 1898; see 

 also E. Beauvois : Les Dernieres Vestiges du Christianisme. 



2 W. G. Gosling: Labrador, chap. 1, 1910. 



3 Alpheus S. Packard: The Labrador Coast, p. 220. 



4 H. R. Holand: The Kensington Rune Stone. Records of the Past, Jan.- 

 Feb. 1910. 



