3O SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



The Ari Marsson story is one of the questionable things which 

 nevertheless may be true. Earl Thorfinn would undoubtedly give his 

 best information to a descendant of the lost man ; but we do not know 

 whether he merely repeated Rafn or had learned independently. The 

 latter s account was earlier than ThorkeFs we are told, but there is no 

 pretence that this Rafn knew anything personally or made any close 

 inquiry. Vigfusson decided that he was not an Icelander ; and noth 

 ing seems to be known of him, except that he heard the story in 

 Limerick, presumably from seafaring people, and carried it to Ice 

 land. Now this is the city obviously linked with the Island of Brazil 

 by the implication of the earliest fourteenth century maps. 



But it is not in Limerick sailors yarns, however possible, nor in 

 parallel nomenclature, however significant, nor in obvious infer 

 ence, popular belief and geographical statements or representations 

 having no a ssured basis, to establish an important fact of history. 

 One must feel that Irish monks, blinded to everything beyond their 

 absorbing purpose, may very well have been here before any Norse 

 man ; but it seems at present beyond proving. 



Yet there is no warrant for treating Great Ireland as assuredly 

 unreal, and reasoning therefrom by analogy against Wineland. The 

 inability to prove is a different thing from conclusive disproval ; 

 and we are so far from the latter that the preponderance of probability 

 leans the other way. Great Ireland, White Men s Land, or Albania 

 is simply an asserted region like the Island of Brazil, believed in for a 

 long time by many people likely to have some inkling of the truth, but 

 which, unlike Brazil, did not find its way into maps drawn by men of 

 southern Europe. Great Ireland and Brazil Island may well be near 

 neighbors, or overlapping names for parts of the same coast. But at 

 present we should hold the matter in abeyance for further light. 



5. THE COLONIZATION OF GREENLAND 



Toward the end of the tenth century various things combined 

 to bring the Icelanders to America. The insular stepping stones 

 out from Europe had grown more familiar than remote districts of 

 their own island ; the habit of voyaging in every direction but one 

 made that exception an anomaly which could not last. Furthermore, 

 the aggressive missionary spirit of Christianity was rising and 

 reaching forth, especially from Norway. Iceland thus far had held 

 out nominally, in a spirit of conservatism, for Odin and his wife 

 and the tremendous warlike Thunder ; but King Olaf 1 was urging his 

 new doctrines, with appeals to commercial advantage and menaces of 



1 Heimskringla. Laing s transl., vol. I, pp. 427, 445. 



