﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK JJ 



party. This is what we seem to have in the voyage-section of the Saga 

 of Thorfmn Karlsefni. But of course we should be on our guard 

 against all signs of later sophistication. 



It certainly means to tell the substantial truth, as did most of 

 the writings, not avowedly mythical or fanciful, of that early time. 

 The period of extravagances, like the Arrow-Odd Saga, of imitations 

 and forgeries and of literary sentimental productions, often very 

 pretty but quite openly fictitious, like Frithiof's Saga and the Saga 

 of Viglund the Fair, was yet far ahead. The conscientiousness of 

 the Landnamabook had set the pace, and men wrote historically, 

 anxious not to vary from the essential truth of what had befallen. 



Unfortunately only a minority of these earlier Icelandic sagas 

 remain — some thirty-five in all; for the world has lost a great 

 treasure. It is natural that we should prize them, even overrate 

 them, when we are induced to know them at all ; but we must not 

 regard them quite as we should the modern painstaking work of a 

 Parkman or a Motley. Their composers were quite without our tests 

 of probability in many things, notably in things supernatural. Even 

 the ghost-game was under different and prodigious rules, which we 

 find out of keeping; for a ghost came usually in the body and 

 veritably out of the grave or dripping from the sea, and he could 

 be clutched and broken and killed like a man. With them the grue- 

 some, fully believed in, quite reached its climax. What iron nerves 

 the northern people must have had to support existence ! 



Moreover, like all unsophisticated non-analytical folk, these nar- 

 rators were liable to confuse their own inferences with what actually 

 was, or could be, known ; the best of them is as ready as any Greek 

 historian with his word-for-word dialogues of two centuries earlier, 

 though these were admittedly unrecorded at the time of utterance and 

 most unlikely to linger for a week without change in any mind. The 

 truth of the sagas x is not then in all cases that of absolute precision. 

 They aimed to present past conditions and occurrences in the most 

 graphic and dramatic fashion, making them live again for the reader 

 or hearer. Apparently the Old Testament narratives were their 

 model ; their own histories developing and diverging from it in so 

 far as their customs, ideals, and beliefs differed from those of its 

 writers, and the work of each saga-man being conditioned by the 

 special material before him, as well as by his individual gifts. 



The first sagas were doubtless very simple and oral, having for 

 contemporaries brief stories and spell-songs in verse, occasionally 



1 Yet see Laing's preface to Heimskringla, p. 188, concerning the local fidelity 

 of the Orkneyinga Saga. 



