718 W. Thalbitzer 



we see recent inventions, local specializations or defects. That the 

 archaic features have persisted longest in East Greenland, is connected 

 naturally with the fact, that this side of the land is more isolated 

 than the west coast and only quite recently has been influenced 

 from the other coast, namely round the land from the south, in 

 consequence of the arrival of Europeans. 



The period at which the northern coasts of Hudson Bay became 

 inhabited by the Eskimo from the west lies perhaps not so very re- 

 mote. If we take it at some few centuries before the year 1000, 

 when Thorfinn Karlsefni and his men met with the Eskimo Skræl- 

 ings near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, this period would probably be 

 sufficient to explain their arrival in Greenland at some time shortly 

 before Eirikr the Red's landing and settling in South Greenland. The 

 first flock, I imagine, has emigrated from the districts in the north- 

 ern corner of Hudson Bay. I shall not discuss the question, by 

 which route these hardy forerunners have reached over to Green- 

 land's southern coasts, where the Icelandic settlers discovered dis- 

 carded objects of Skræling origin. We do not know, whether at 

 that time they lived far north on the coast, but this is the most 

 likely. Those that were living in the south and were not themselves, 

 seen by the Icelanders, were probably cut off from the return north- 

 wards at the south point of Greenland and were obliged during the 

 following centuries to keep to the east coast. Whether they had al- 

 ready succeeded in occupying this coast as far north as Ammassalik 

 or lived closer together right at the south, there seems no possibility 

 of deciding except perhaps by the aid of archæological investigations 

 along this coast. Through the feeble or vacillating conduct of the 

 Norsemen during the period of decline they have in the end been 

 attracted over to the west coast again in constantly increasing numbers. 



The northern immigrants of Greenland, whose descendants still 

 live in the fjords of both coasts right down to the polar circle, have 

 hardly been much slower in arriving than these first immigrants 

 (the prehistoric forerunners) and they have sprung from the same 

 mother-group in the central regions. It is conceivable that they have 

 taken a somewhat shorter time to reach down to Disko Bay than to 

 the large fjords five degrees further north on the east coast, in other 

 words, that Franz Josephs Fjord and Scoresby Sound have not been 

 occupied from such an early period as the northern fjords of West 



in the Elskimo language, which presumably has followed with the special inven- 

 tion, made hy another jjeople, to the Eskimo. The same applies to the Eskimo 

 word for a boot (kamik, in several oblique cases Avith an altered root *kammak), 

 which seems to be related to the Lappländers' gabmaga ^^komag, Lapp-shoes',, 

 derived from galbmal "to freeze'" (oî a human being ; Finnish *kalp- "cold". 



