86 Norway and the Norwegians 



did not at all answer to the descriptions of Greenland 

 which he had heard in Iceland. He saw land several 

 times, but never put to shore, though his crew were 

 anxious to do so. Leif, liowever, the son of Erik the 

 Eed, made an expedition in the same direction, and did 

 land in one or two places. One of these, wherein he 

 erected a little fort and did some trading and fighting 

 with the natives — whom the account calls Skrailinger, 

 the name which the Sagas also give to the natives of 

 Greenland — he called Vinland — wine-land — because his 

 men found grapes there. How the Icelanders recognised 

 the grapes for what they were is explained by the fact 

 that Leif had in his company a man called Tyrker, a 

 native of the wine-growing parts of Germany. This 

 Yinland is America ; and there, on the American coast, 

 we may leave for a while this most distant settlement 

 of the northern race. 



Now let us, remembering what was narrated in the 

 previous chapter, take a glance at the map of Europe, 

 say in the year a.d. 912, and see how wide an area was 

 occupied by people of the Scandinavian race. They 

 extended in a sort of arc, or, perhaps one should say, in 

 two arcs, round the Christian nations, round the people 

 who constituted the true Catholic Europe of the middle 

 a^es. Lookincj first to the east, we see them settled in 

 their Greater Suithiod from Kiev to Novgorod. Tliis place 

 — their chief city and earliest settlement — they called 

 Holmgaard. We do not quite know what settlements 

 the Norsemen had in the Gulf of Finland, in Esthonia, 

 and on the southern shore of the Baltic ; but in the 

 latter region there was one very celebrated little re- 

 public where lies modern Mecklenburg, whose capital 



