8d SMITHSONIAN&quot; MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 59 



or Helluland; or commemorative, as Biarney, where they slew a 

 bear. Furdurstrandir, The Wonderstrands, if not obviously and 

 precisely descriptive, is descriptively explained in the sagas, only 

 one meaning being given by them ; which there is strong reason to 

 accept. However, Dr. Nansen dissents (see In Northern Mists), 

 and would make it commemorate some undisclosed wonders, or pos 

 sibly a memory picture of beautiful tropical islands, seen or heard 

 about or of mythical heavens anciently modeled thereon. The topic 

 will be resumed in a later chapter. The name is not on the Iceland 

 maps, and Mr. Stefansson of the Library of Congress, a south-Ice 

 lander by birth and long residence, does not know of it there. 



Apparently this is the one invention of the explorers in local nomen 

 clature and one of the most significant items of their saga, defining 

 aptly the impression of the typical American sea-shore of intermin 

 able strand and dune, which they could never have encountered be 

 fore and would never afterward find elsewhere. It would have been 

 equally unknown to the later saga-man or even to Hauk Erlendson, 

 who copied him in the first third of the fourteenth century since 

 neither of these could be aware of anything distinctively American 

 except from the Wineland sagas and traditions. 



The methods of naming above-mentioned overlap in some degree, 

 so that it is not always possible to say whether old, general associa 

 tions or new observation have had the greater share. One would say 

 that these Icelandic visitors were rather more careful than some 

 of their successors to avoid such incongruities as the Naples of 

 interior New York, or as Snow Hill, a county seat beside a small 

 cypress-bordered river in a flat farming region near the sea. But 

 no doubt it is safe to distrust unlikely and uncorroborated explana 

 tions of the saga names or events, especially where we are given a 

 choice of two in different versions ; for example, the alternatives 

 about Keelness or the two accounts of the first finding of the grapes. 

 They have the air of afterthoughts, accounting for or illustrating 

 some item as to which there was no further light, but which the 

 saga-men, or the composers of material which they incorporated, 

 were not self-denying enough to merely leave as found. 



The personages of the story were born, and for the most part 

 reared, under the Northern pre-Christian religion ; so it would 

 not seem strange to find Thor s name occurring as frequently as that 

 of Jesus still does in Mexico, or as those of St. Patrick or St. Michael 

 do in Ireland ; yet it must be admitted that Thord, Thorhall, Thor- 

 biorn, Thorwald, the two Thorsteins, Thorgunna, and several others, 

 occurring in a single saga, not of the longest, may be counted exces- 



