NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 75 



originally simple story. Successive writers, in rather lengthened 

 series, mainly took their cue from these works, with little heed to his 

 warning, so that their widely differing schemes of the explorations 

 were based on the Flateybook's entangled, blurred, disjointed and be- 

 wildering data and likewise the objections of the sceptical dealt 

 often with items misreported or lacking foundation. Rafn's volu- 

 minous Antiquitates Americans, though doing the great service of 

 presenting almost the entire array of Scandinavian evidence and 

 urging the subject effectively on public attention, repeated this time- 

 honored error, adding to it the Newport tower, the Dighton rock, 

 wild Indian-corn and other damaging credulities. Even Vigfusson's 

 Origines Islandicse, published long after his death, held in the text 

 the same ground about the Flateybook, contradicting one of its own 

 notes, and provoking Professor Olson's very natural suggestion that 

 " some hand less cunning than Vigfusson's " had perhaps been at 

 work. Similarly Fiske's Discovery of America adheres generally in 

 the text to the Flateybook, though its notes feel the influence of 

 new light recently received. 



Dr. Gustav Storm of Chrfstiania was the first to present effectively 

 the true state of the case in his pivotal Studies on the Vineland Voy- 

 ages, an English translation of which will be found in the Memoires 

 de la Societe Royale des Antiquaires du Nord 1888. Reeves followed 

 his lead (1890) in The Finding of Wineland the Good, a work char- 

 acterized by Dr. Fiske as " the best book we have on the subject in 

 English or perhaps in any language." Probably it is so, if by " best " 

 we understand the most accurate and elaborate within its limits, rather 

 than the most original. It is the only one giving facsimiles of the 

 vellum pages of the Wineland sagas and an approximately complete 

 list of the extant later copies, its reproductions in print of the original 

 Icelandic, with line for line carefully stated English translations, are 

 accepted as the most reliable and it adds by footnotes and final notes, 

 in data and commentary, a very great amount of new and highly in- 

 structive material. But he passes by almost wholly the subject of 

 localities which his forerunner had treated with great care and, as to 

 most points, I think, with nearly exact insight. Dieserud 1 (1901), 

 in a valuable paper before the American Geographical Society, and 

 Olson in his condensed and clear preface to the Voyages of the 

 Northmen in the Scribner's series " The Original Narratives of Early 

 American History " have emphatically taken the same ground ; which 

 is not likely to be lost again. 



l jmil Dieserud: Norse Discoveries in America. Reprint from Bull. Amer. 

 Geogr. Soc. 

 6 



