﻿74 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



looseness of language as in the other case. It is true that the char- 

 acteristics of Hop are blended with those of Straumfiord in the con- 

 fusion of this corrupted saga; but the latter preponderate on the 

 whole and we cannot suppose the more southerly point to be intended. 

 Grand Manan would have made a good observatory. But no doubt 

 Dr. Fiske is right in holding that the context implies a length of 

 winter day which surprised them ; so it must have exceeded that at 

 Dublin, or even Rouen, which they currently visited in their trading 

 voyages. Perhaps we might add Bordeaux, taken by their Norse 

 kinfolk a century or two before and which they may have known very 

 well, but this after all is hardly certain enough for reliance. 



They were no doubt the first observers of the difference between 

 isothermal lines and lines of latitude crossing the Atlantic ocean, a 

 dislocation which the human mind even yet finds it hard to- realize 

 or regard as quite natural. Some point in southern New England 

 seems called for; though possibly Yarmouth or Eastport might do. 



It would be interesting to know whence these bits of really 

 illuminating tradition drifted into the Flateybook version, but they 

 cannot offset the grave charges against it. The preference long and 

 generally given this later derivative and corrupted saga has been one 

 of the chief causes of investigation going astray. Two others are a 

 persistent conception of Wineland as an organized continuing colony 

 and the innocent acceptance of the present seaboard as that of the 

 year 1000. Of course there are still others. 



Dr. Fiske says in a note it " is like summer boarders in the country 

 struggling to tell one another where they have been to drive — past 

 a school-house, down a steep hill, through some woods and by a saw 

 mill " ; for " the same general discription will often apply well enough 

 to several different places." This is an apt illustration of the muddled 

 and unhelpful presentation of locality in the Flateybook, but does 

 not apply at all to the graphic, precise, and individualized sailing 

 directions of the earlier Hauksbook saga, or still better, its companion 

 Eric the Red. 



Bishop Bryniolf, with a discoverer's delight, no doubt impressed 

 the importance of his ample and beautiful prize on Torfseus and the 

 royal recipient, and it was most natural that the historian should put 

 its version prominently forward in his history (1705), the first of all 

 books on Wineland, though printing with it the Saga of Thorfinn 

 Karlsefni ; also that the great von Humboldt, knowing no Icelandic, 

 should accept his verdict and consider mainly in the Examen Critique 

 those two chapters from the Tryggvason saga, though not failing to 

 note the evident effect of long continued oral transmission on an 



