Norsemen’s route from Greenland to Wineland. 161 
of the supposed voyages eventually having taken place as stated is ex- 
tremely slight. 
It is remarkable that this author, who in several respects goes so 
thoroughly and solidly to work should, when constructing his main 
result, allow himself to give way to such a degree to spontaniety. But 
as a sort of expression for this perplexity in which the problem of 
the position of Wineland still rests, his views are of interest. 
I. 
For the investigation in question, one of the chief results of the 
foregoing will be that the investigation must to a prominent degree 
rely on the account in Eric the Red’s saga. 
Naturally one must keep in view the fact that even the saga is 
no geographical treatise, with conscious, and exactly professional des- 
criptive expressions, but a record containing deficiencies and perhaps 
even faults, which have slipped in for several different reasons. The 
heterogeneous condition of the new countries, those in most respects 
unexperienced travellers, the third and fourth-hand relators, after 
whose records the saga has been penned,.... these and other circum- 
stances are sources for error, the effects of which, without doubt, have 
asserted themselves. 
Then one must remember that the reports originate from coasting 
Norse peasants, who first accidentally came in contact with new coun- 
tries, which they then investigated — not with scientific interest, but 
with a view to how far they were adapted to colonization, seen from 
a Norseman’s point of view. That is to say that first of all they ought to 
be grassy; then they should be fit for agriculture, and have in addition 
forests, wood and timber, but finally they must necessarily abound in 
fish, as fishing was the means of livelihood in which the Norsemen found 
refuge in such times as the lack of daily food began to pinch. 
This shortly expresses the most necessary qualities of the countries 
which could entice the Norsemen and awaken their wanderlust or migra- 
tory instinct, just as the gold countries enticed the Spaniards in Ame- 
rica, and the new fur regions enticed the Russians to Siberia and to the 
regions about the northern Pacific Ocean. The migrations to Iceland and 
Greenland had, moreover, so much the character of the expelled emi- 
grants, that attraction is only partially to be shown as their motive in 
these cases. First Wineland was adapted to stir the popular stream, 
but it lay too far away, and the migrations declined, partly through lack 
of strength, and partly because the migrants here met with resistance 
from the older inhabitants. 
