﻿y8 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



carved in wood in the runic alphabet, as told us by Egil's Saga ; 

 magic formulas and sailing directions, besides other useful memoran- 

 da, being also thus preserved. Such tales were a part of education, 

 as well as a means of entertainment, wherever people gathered, say 

 at the Althing, or about their home-fires in the long halls during 

 the earlier hours of winter nights. 



When Ari Frodi inaugurated Icelandic prose literature a little 

 after the year noo, the experiment " took " as we say, but most of 

 his disciples or emulators must have found it easier to write briefly. 

 Later the tales of a neighborhood or those that hung about a notable 

 man would often be welded together by other hands. If this work 

 were done mainly by one writer there would be general unity of 

 style and literary effect, but with the original elements yet distinguish- 

 able. The great sagas are all of this composite character ; yet with 

 this imposed artistic unity, though it may be harder to dissect Egla 

 or Laxdaela than the Eyrbyggja Saga, which almost dissects itself. 



Our Wineland saga, though not the longest, is clearly of their 

 class and kind. It seems that a shorter Saga of Eric the Red and 

 one of Thorfinn Karlsefni's voyage must have been thus united in it, 

 including also parts of a lost saga of Leif — other fragments of the 

 latter being represented perhaps by the Thorgunna chapters of the 

 Eyrbyggja Saga. The same hand has polished and kneaded it all, 

 introducing some illustrative adornments like the incantation scene, 

 chiefly, though not quite exclusively, in the preliminary Greenland 

 section. There seems to have been great care on the part of this 

 final saga-man, say of 1200, not to confuse or distort Thorfinn's careful 

 memoranda of coastal geography. 



As the saga comes to us, the contrast in subject matter is obvious 

 and great. The phantoms, miracles, magic, and prophecy are all 

 in the earlier Greenland part, the sailing directions all in that relating 

 to Wineland. The former must be considered an historical romance, 

 embodying all that we know of Red Eric, as well as Gudrid's ancestry 

 and early life, her loves and bereavements ; the latter is a matter of 

 fact statement of her unique adventure in exploration with her hus- 

 band, adding bits of information and episodical anecdote. The record 

 making the backbone of this voyage-history might have been origin- 

 ally in very few words, not vastly exceeding the inscription found on 

 one of the Women's Islands in Baffin's Bay. That such guides to 

 future explorers, travelers, traders and colonists were matters of care 

 and conscience to competent early navigators appears very clearly 

 from Champlain's seventeenth century account of the way to get into 

 the Penobscot, Ivar Bardsen's fourteenth century account of the way 



