﻿66 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



The parts in question form two chapters, separately imbedded in 

 the Saga of Olaf Tryggvason, which is an important feature of that 

 miscellaneous and bulky compilation, these having for titles respec- 

 tively, A Brief Narrative of Eric the Red and A Brief Narrative 

 of the Greenlanders, but being adapted to form a connected minor 

 saga when put together. Probably this was their normal condition 

 and the scribes dislocated them to build them into the longer saga, a 

 common practice of that period. At any rate they have often been 

 restored to this hypothetical continuity and so published, usually as 

 The Saga of Eric the Red. This is manifestly confusing, an earlier 

 claimant of that title being already in possession. It will be better 

 to designate it The Flateybook Wineland Saga. The Flateybook is 

 considered the handsomest as well as the most copious of all the Ice- 

 landic manuscripts. Formerly its Wineland narrative was some- 

 times assumed to have been composed in Greenland, perhaps from the 

 nature of the two headings of its sections ; but we do not know that 

 any sagas were written there and discover nothing like affirmative 

 testimony in this instance — which, indeed, seems close to a decisive 

 negation. For the Flateybook version robs Eric's house of the claim 

 to first discovery and charges his daughter Freydis with atrocious 

 unbelievable crime. No one in any way connected with Eric or 

 accepting his or his son's leadership could be expected to tolerate it. 

 Even remote descendants would not enjoy the hearing or reading. 



Some Scandinavian writers (see Reeves's notes) have credited this 

 version conjecturally to the north of Iceland, others lay stress on the 

 undoubted first finding of it as an heirloom in the west on Flat- 

 island of Broadfirth, but cannot follow the trail much farther. 

 Back of its rather late emergence there is a long period unaccounted 

 for, and its place of origin is unknown. 



The Arne-Magnean vellum MS. 557 quarto, containing the third 

 of these old sagas, must have been copied about 1400, according to 

 Vigfusson and other Icelandic authorities. Its transcriber did not 

 have Hauksbook before him, because he copied more archaic terms and 

 even some slight verbal errors, not in the saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni, 

 but evidently from the lost original or an intermediate copy — most 

 likely the latter, Also, as pointed out by Prof. Olson, it does not have 

 the ending of the pedigree, which Hauk personally added. 



A. M. Reeves mentions two verbal items, which, on the face of 

 them, appear to favor the Flateybook. It gives the name Midiokul 

 for the first point in Greenland sighted by Eric, adding that it is " now 

 called Blacksark." The Thorfinn saga calls it Blacksark only ; that 

 of Eric the Red, perhaps by the transcriber's error, calls it only 



