700 W. Thalbitzer 



— The difierent records mentioned here are however of greatly difiering im- 

 portance in regard to their historical genuineness. As to A it only gives an 

 abstract in \vhich most of the characteristic details are left out and contains 

 besides some misunderstandings, especially the confusion of the name Igalikko^) 

 instead of the name Ungortok (i. e. name of a place instead of name of a per- 

 son). Like Ci, Bj contains the record which probably comes nearest to the 

 truth ; these two versions agree quite well and each of them also contains inter- 

 esting details; in both the scene is laid at Qaqortoq in the Julianehaabsfjord, 

 from which place Oongortoq (this form of the name is preferable from a phonetic 

 point of view) fled towards the south. B3 only gives some supplementary in- 

 formation about Oongortoq's friend Olavik, with whom he sought refuge in 

 the Igalikofjord but the description of the flight of the latter with his little son 

 seems to have been erroneously referred by this variant to Olavik instead of 

 Oongortoq. In Cg and Cg we have only a northern variety of the tale about 

 Oongortoq localized in the Ameralikfjord lying in the same region where the 

 narrator lived ( God thaabsf jord) and mixed with various other themes, as e. g. 

 the tale about Navaranak (or Navaranaaq). The confusion is evidently due 

 to this that both tales deal with hostilities among the two neighbouring peoples, 

 the Eskimo and a foreign people, brought about by the treachery of a single 

 young man or woman and causing the murder of women and children. In con- 

 trast to the tale about Oongortoq the one about Navaranaaq is known outside 

 Gree uland, namely, on Baffin Land, in Labrador and on the coasts of Hudson 

 Bay. In these regions they do not speak of QaLLunaait (white men) in this con- 

 nection but of a foreign inland people named Tornit or AhLet 'the foreigners'^). 

 We need not take it for granted (in order to explain the confusion and mixing 

 of the tales) that these foreigners in Labrador have been a people resembling 

 the QaLLunaait whom the Eskimo met with later in South Greenland; (it may 

 have been so, but this resemblance would hardly have been preserved so dis- 

 tinct as to occasion a comparison to be made between two distant groups of 

 QaLLunaait (or ALLet) after the course of several generations, perhaps several 

 centuries) ; the simiUarity of the two episodes will ■ do quite well for explaining 

 the mixture of the two tales. It is of course not implied here that the two ver- 

 sions Cg and C3 do not contain some true features. — В 2 and Dg contain variants 

 of a song about Oongortoq (see p. 705) from the Julianehaabsfjord (60° 4' N. 

 lat.) and from Arssuk (61^ 13') respectively. 



The first time we hear a little of the Eskimo's own traditions about the 

 encounters between the old Norsemen and the Eskimo is in Poul Egede^). 

 It is only a fragment, namely, the same introduction with which B^ begins : a 

 kaiak-man rowing about for hunting purposes throws his dart after some birds 

 and sees for the first time a "Kablunak" sitting on the beach. Kablunak (i. e. 

 QaLLunaaq, a white man, Norseman) mocks the bad shot of the Eskimo and 

 says: "I am an auk, try to hit me!" The Eskimo approached and hit him and 



^) Igalikko, the name of the inner arm of the Julianehaabsfjord, according to 

 Pingel (1838 — 39) p. 242, means "a country witli cooking places that has been 

 deserted", or "the remnants of a cooking-place or kitchen (place of the pots)". 

 The name is extraordinary and proves that the Eskimo have come across some- 

 thing artificial, which they had not seen before (church bells?). According to thetradi 

 tion the Eskimo in previous times called this arm of the fjord Kanç/erdluluk, 

 probably originating from the time when the Norsemen were still living there. 



-) The variants of these tales are found partly in Rink jiartly in Boas. I have 

 given a general survey thereof recently' in my book (1913) pp. 40 — 45 and 

 69—72. Cf. here p. «90. 



■') P. Egede (1788; p. 81 - 82. 



