56 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



without that special kind of proof required by the technical restric 

 tions and arbitrary rules of convenience of English-speaking courts. 



Apart from the chief narratives the Hauksbook Saga of Thorfinn 

 Karlsefni, the closely parallel Saga of Eric the Red, and the two 

 chapters relating to Greenland and Wineland in the Flateybook 

 Saga of Olaf Tryggvason there are divers brief statements of 

 very old writers, which corroborate and check them. 



Our first witness is the prebendary, Adam of Bremen, not a 

 Scandinavian but a well known German geographical author and 

 official clergyman, who visited the court of Denmark about 1069, 

 when he might still converse there with men who had met Leif or 

 Thorfinn or some of their following and heard the story from their 

 own lips. His &quot; Description of the Northern Islands &quot; was probably 

 completed in Latin in 1076, undoubtedly not much later. In the 

 sixteenth century there were at least six manuscript copies extant, 1 

 one or more being probably in southern Germany. Two such copies, 

 written out in the thirteenth century, are now in Copenhagen and 

 Vienna. The book was first published in print in 1585. Its 

 authenticity is undoubted. 



Reporting a conversation with the Danish King, it says: 



Moreover he spoke of an island in that ocean, which is called Wineland, for 

 the reason that vines grow wild there, which yield the best of wine. More 

 over, that grain unsown grows there abundantly is not a fabulous fancy, but 

 from the accounts of the Danes we know it to be a fact. 2 



Then he proceeds to tell of the &quot; insupportable ice,&quot; and gloom of 

 uninhabitable regions beyond, ending the passage with a moving 

 discourse on the perils of the northern seas. Here we seem to have 

 some tradition of Helluland with its savage surroundings. 



The name Wineland is superfluous to identify the more southern 

 and more favored region, in view of the wild grain which is men 

 tioned, and the wild grapes capable of making good wine. The 

 valuable monograph of Dr. Jenks 8 on The Wild Rice Gatherers of 

 the Northwest plainly discloses what a staff of life the Zizania still 

 is to thousands of Indians. Many of the slow rivers of our Atlantic 

 slope abound in it no less than the smaller glacial lakes. As to the 

 wild vintage grapes, Lescarbot 4 who was of those next making their 

 acquaintance along this shore, vaunts wine as God s best gift to men, 



1 G. Storm : Studies on the Vineland Voyages. Memoires Societe Royale des 

 Antiquaires du Nord, 1888; also separate 1889. 



2 Translation in Reeves s &quot;The Finding of Wineland the Good,&quot; chap. 6, p. 92. 



3 Ninth Ann. Rep. Bureau Amer. Ethnol., p. 1018. 



4 Nova Francia. Erondelle s transl., p. 97. 



