488 W. Thalbitzer 



them and of this there is quite a brief account in Historia Norwegiae, 

 a work that must have been written by a clergyman in Norway 

 almost about the same period ^). Regarding the Skrœlings we find 

 it related here: "They have no iron whatever and use whale-teeth 

 for missiles and sharp stones for knives." 



As the Eskimo have immigrated to the north-west corner of 

 Greenland from the regions west of Hudson Bay, where there is an 

 Eskimo tribe along the lower course of the Coppermine River which 

 from ancient times has developed working in metal, we might 

 imagine, that the partial replacing of bone and stone with iron by 

 the Greenland Eskimo was only a continuation of the copper industry 

 of their forefathers. Both weapon points and knife blades made from 

 the natural copper, which is simply hammered out. are very com- 

 mon near the Coppermine River. The British Museum has an ex- 

 cellent collection of these pre-European copper objects from Corona- 

 tion Gulf and so also the Christiania Museum. In the Gjøa collec- 

 tion (Amundsen) of the Christiania Museum I remarked 75 weapon 

 points from the same regions (harpoons, lances and bow-arrows), 55 

 of which were provided with metal blades (mainly copper); 15 bow- 

 arrows had bone points, 4 harpoon heads were of bone all in one 

 piece, only one dart had a blade of stone. Nevertheless, it is doubt- 

 ful, if there is any connection between the copper industry of the 

 Central Eskimo, which does not seem to have spread to their neigh- 

 bours to any extent, and the use by the North-west Greenlanders of 

 the natural iron on their coasts. Both the material and the forms 

 in question are very different at the two places. 



In 1872 already Japetus Steenstrup described some Greenland 

 knives, the cutting part of which consisted of a number of small 

 iron plates, in size like a three-penny piece, which were fixed in a 

 groove along the edge of a bone haft^). Such knives were found 

 earlier by Ross (1819) at Sowalik in northernmost Greenland among the 

 Smith Sound Eskimo, who made use of small pieces from the three 

 large meteorites at Cape York in constructing their weapons. They 

 beat these pieces out into small plates or discs, which they fixed in 

 a row in a groove along the one side of a flat haft to form the 

 cutting edge; this they probably found more serviceable than the 



about O. Solberg's much more southerly localization of these names (Solberg 

 19U7, pp. <S5 — 'JOj, which implies that the Eskimo inhabited Disko Вал' already 

 at the same time as the Icelanders settled in South Greenland. 



1) F. Jonsson (1901) pp. (i0:j-606. 



-) Japetus Steenstrup: Sur remploi du fer météorique par les Esquimaux de Grœn- 

 land (1872). Cf. J. Lorenzen (1882) p. l.')7. 



