﻿54 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



ference three feet above the ground. The story told by the inscrip- 

 tion is improbable nearly to the point of impossibility. The runes 

 are discredited by the verdicts of Messrs Dieserud and Flom and 

 other competent philologists. The well-known but quite unauthentic 

 map of J. Toulmin Smith, which took Thorfinn by sheer guesswork 

 to Baffin Land before his departure southward, is offered us again as 

 a background for the later travels of the alleged Minnesota explorers 

 by the Hudson Bay route. Biornsland parades there below Hvitra- 

 mannaland, Gudleif 's course to and from it being traced as conscien- 

 tiously as though something could be known, or reasonably conjec- 

 tured, about it or him. And little but darkening of counsel can come 

 from such a suggestion as that the forestland may be northward of 

 the region of stony desolation. We find no sound reason for suppos- 

 ing that any Norsemen ever were in the neighborhood where the 

 stone was found before the nineteenth century. 



It seems, then, that so far as investigation has gtone, there is not a 

 single known record or relic of Wineland, Markland, Helluland, or 

 any Norse or Icelandic voyage of discovery, extant at this time on 

 American soil, which may be relied on with any confidence. There 

 are inscriptions, but apparently Indians made them all except the 

 freakish work of white men in our own time ; there are games, 

 traditional stories, musical compositions, weapons, utensils, remnants 

 of rude architecture, and residua of past engineering work, but no 

 link necessarily connects them with the period of Icelandic explora- 

 tion or with the Norse race. One and all they may perfectly well be 

 of some other origin — Indian, Basque,, Breton, Norman, Dutch, 

 Portuguese, French, Spanish, or English. Too many natives were 

 on the ground, and too many different European peoples, who were 

 not Scandinavians, came here between 1497 and 1620 for us to accept 

 anything as belonging to or left by a Norse Wineland, without unim- 

 peachable proof. 



8.— CERTAIN COLLATERAL ITEMS OF EVIDENCE 



Greenland and Wineland were coupled together from the begin- 

 ning in popular mention. Thus we have seen Ari the Wise, between 

 the years 1100 and 11 14, referring to the hypothetical natives of the 

 former and the well known natives of the latter in one sentence. 

 About 1400 Ordericus Vitalis referred to " Finland " with Greenland, 

 apparently meaning Vinland or Wineland, since he does not seem to 

 have had the Baltic Finnland in mind. Between these, in 1121, 

 according to Icelandic annals, Eric Gnupson, then Bishop of Green- 



