﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 163 



It is true that men learned very early of lovely Mediterranean 

 islands and drew on their memory of reality to picture others, some- 

 times real, sometimes unreal. Myths attached themselves to both. 

 Afterward the Canaries supplied material in the same way. Some- 

 times they were called isles of the blest or earthly paradises, with 

 good reason and decorated by the exaggeration of poetry and legend 

 with supernal additional delights; sometimes their lovely character- 

 istics were transferred by sailors' fancy to islands farther out at sea. 

 Some of the latter were real; we know them as the Azores and 

 Madeira; the fourteenth century map-makers knew them un- 

 doubtingly as The Fortunate Isles of St. Brandan. Their obvious 

 attributes corroborated the ideal. We are not justified in saying con- 

 clusively that this was or was not the end of the process. But if 

 anyone crossed the Atlantic in warm latitudes, as Cabral did by acci- 

 dent and Columbus by intention, they would find like beauties 

 repeated. Before " mythical islands " can justly be used to disprove 

 anything we must be sure they were mythical. Even then it would 

 not be necessary to assume that men, in reporting things that really 

 are, had borrowed from fanciful stories. 



(8) The most significant features in the description of these Fortunate Isles, 

 or Isles of the Blest, in late classical times and in Isidore are the self-grown or 

 wild-growing vine (on the heights) and the wild-growing (uncultivated, self- 

 sown or unsown) corn or wheat or even cornfields (Isidore). In addition there 

 were lofty trees (Pliny) and mild winters. Thus a complete correspondence 

 with the saga's description of Wineland. 



Great trees are common in many parts of the world, so are mild 

 winters in southerly regions on the same longitudinal line. But 

 Isidore says nothing to strongly suggest wild growing grain seen in 

 low places by men entering an estuary with grape-vines on the hills 

 above it. Neither does Pliny nor any other authority cited. The 

 combination is distinctly American on the Atlantic slope not far 

 from the sea and within the limits of the large fox grape though no 

 doubt it might occur elsewhere. Thorfinn gives this for Hop. 



Nansen, however, has certainly shown (if messis be taken to neces- 

 sarily mean grain) a fair anticipation of Adam's celebrated state- 

 ment, but the coincidence may well grow out of parallel facts. There 

 is no real evidence of derivation by him from Isidore of Seville or 

 from Pliny ; but there may well have been grape-festooned islands of 

 the eastern Atlantic on which some form of wild grain or grain run 

 wild might be found. It is not pretended that fox-grapes and our 

 wild rice are the only wild grapes fit for wine and the only self-sown 

 grain in the world. 



