﻿142 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



analogy, in advance of discovery. We can see the process at work 

 after a hundred years in the surviving Libellus of the Islendingabok, 

 written by Ari the Wise, who was no doubt the best informed 

 man in Iceland. Here is the passage : " This country which is called 

 Greenland was discovered and colonized from Iceland. Eric the 

 Red was the name of the man, an inhabitant of Breidafirth who went 

 thither from here and settled at that place which has since been 

 called Ericsfirth. He gave a name to the country and called it 

 Greenland and said that it must persuade men to go thither if the 

 land had a good name. They found there, both east and west in the 

 country, the dwellings of men and fragments of boats and stone imple- 

 ments such that it may be perceived from these that that manner of 

 the people had been there who have inhabited Wineland and whom 

 the Greenlanders call Skrellings. And this when he set about the 

 colonization of the country was 14 or 15 winters before the intro- 

 duction of Christianity here in Iceland, according to which a certain 

 man who himself accompanied Eric the Red thither, informed Thor- 

 kell Gellison." 



Broken boats, tools, and dwellings defined as savages (Skrellings) 

 the former occupants, who had probably withdrawn to the north- 

 ward 1 or kept at home there, refraining from southward journeys 

 and therefore they were presumably like the other Skrellings already 

 encountered in Wineland. In other words, the Winelanders were not 

 called Skrellings because there were Eskimo already known, but the 

 Eskimo, long before they were seen, were called Skrellings by con- 

 jecture, because the word had come to Iceland traditionally from 

 American adventures then a century old. Of course the two kinds 

 of Skrelling (savage) might be utterly dissimilar, according to our 

 modern standards. 



Perhaps it was in the twelfth century, 2 perhaps not till the thirteenth 

 century, that Norse hunters in upper Greenland met small " Skrell- 

 ings," who used stone knives and whalebone arrowheads — Eskimo 

 undoubtedly — as related by a manuscript discovered in Scotland in 

 the nineteenth century. 3 The greater Greenland landowners had 

 hunting lodges, as we may call them, at the north, and kept ships to 

 sail there ; so such contact must happen at last. 



In the year 1266 an expedition was sent to find out about them, 

 as before mentioned, and seems to have gone very far north, indeed 



x Fr. Nansen: Eskimo Life, Chap. 5. 



2 G. Storm: Studies on the Vineland Voyages. 



3 W. Thalbitzer : Eskimo Language, p. 22. 



