459 



secured with a lashing of sinew. Tlie author expressly declares 

 that the iron cannot be derived from iron ore found in the 

 the land itself, but that it is really iron wrought, and the 

 supposition is advanced that it is a piece of the iron which 

 Clavering gave as a present to the natives in 1823, in the 

 form of knives and other objects, as he himself has related. 

 Ryder M found two man's knives with blades of iron, of which, 

 however, only one piece is extant; he also comes to the con- 

 clusion that it is not of Greenlandic origin, but has been 

 washed ashore with wreckage or drift timber. Finally Nathorst 

 iHammar)-) also found a knife (length 20 cm) with an iron blade 

 and a haft of ivory, as well as a chisel with an iron point and 

 a haft of reindeer horn. All these implements, however, by 

 no means belong to the same type, and there is no denying 

 that several of them diverge from the types of knives we know 

 from the West Eskimo districts. The divergences, however, 

 at least as far as a number of them are concerned, do not 

 seem to me so great as to preclude our explaining them as 

 varieties within the original type, and to these we must reckon 

 inv. Amd. 79^ even if the separate parts of this knife, both 

 the blade and the handle, were brought to this coast from 

 Europe •''). 



Inv. Amd. 80 (Fig. 49), from Dunholm, is a flat block of 

 wood, length 6'5 cm, with downwardly diverging side edges 

 and an oval head; the base is about double as broad as the 

 slenderer centre, but only half as thick as the latter, the lower 



») Ryder 321—322. 



*) Nathorst 347, figs, a and b; Stolpe PL 4, fig. 11. 



') I have no grounds for supposing that the iron in this knife is of telluric 

 (Greenlandic) origin. But in this connection I wish to point out that 

 K. I. V. Steenstrup has shown on the basis of objects found in 

 graves from West Greenland that the Eskimo have occasionally used 

 for their implements genuine iron of telluric origin, occuring in the 

 basalt. May not this apply also to some of the implements from North 

 East Greenland, in which iron is found used? Gf. Steenstrup's reports 

 in "Meddelelser om Grøriland" 2, 215 and 4, 121. 



