170 Daniet BRUUN. 
They themselves had this feeling, therefore the pope was repeat- 
edly requested, to send priests to the country, already in 1100. Shal- 
lowness in every phase of life was the feature that characterized the 
Norse age’s last period — that period of which we know so very little. 
There were only few pleasures. One had horses and could therefore ride 
out visiting if one did not prefer going by boat, or by sledges during 
the winter. Sometimes they amused themselves with hopping on one 
leg along a row of stones set up. Such rows are still found in several 
places in Godthaabsfiord. Bow and arrow shooting and bodily exercise 
were also amusements they indulged in. 
There were generally no drinking bouts, beer could not be brewed, 
malt was wanting. 
In spite of the Norse colony’s remoteness, we can almost say shut 
in, from the rest of the world which contained the culture of that age, 
the Greenlanders kept, in any case during their first period — perhaps 
during the first centuries — a mental vivacity, which produced literary 
results — inevitably far from the same degree as in Iceland, where their 
kinsmen, at this period were flourishing in poetry and saga tales (at that 
time however verbal). Such were not wanting in Greenland, in any 
case, a few perhaps even several, of Edda’s poems were composed 
in Greenland, as FINNUR Jonsson has tried to make clear. 
