INTRODUCTION xi 



and the lords of England. Other large contingents 

 went to the British Isles direct, conquering, among 

 other places, Yorkshire and Lancashire in England, 

 Sutherland and Caithness in Scotland, and the Dub- 

 lin region of Ireland. 



If any people in Europe have been more arrogant 

 than the Romans of two thousand years ago or the 

 English of the last two hundred years, it was the 

 Vikings of a thousand years ago. From their point 

 of view nothing was discovered till they discovered 

 it, and so they were not fabricating but rather speak- 

 ing in tune with their time when they said that they 

 discovered Iceland around 850 A.D. But for long 

 periods before they had been in intimate if predatory 

 contact with Ireland, and they were masters there 

 now. They were apt at learning, if perhaps not quite 

 so apt as the French have asserted. Nothing was more 

 familiar to them than the lore of the sea, and it is 

 simply not credible that they could have remained 

 in such long and intimate contact with the Irish with- 

 out learning from them that there were other Irish- 

 men resident in Iceland with either intermittent or 

 regular navigation between the two countries. Even 

 if it be true that the Norse Naddodd "discovered" 

 Iceland accidentally when driven out of his Faeroes 

 course by a storm (as the sagas assert), the news of the 

 "discovery" can have been little more of a surprise to 



