ies 
Fig. 16. Sledging on the fiord ice along the ice-foot of the rocks. 
FOLKLORE 
At a distance of a couple of days voyage, opposite to Ammas- 
salik, lies Iceland, the saga isle which 1000 years ago and up to our 
time has been famous as the seat of a flourishing literature that has 
left deep and ineffaceable traces in Europe’s spiritual culture. Think 
of the Edda poems, the epic style of the sagas, the refined art of 
the bards, the highly developed juridical system ete. 
Through the Eskimo immigration to Greenland — probably not 
much later, perhaps even simultaneously with the Icelanders’ occupa- 
tion of their atlantic island — a stream of heathen traditions were 
led from arctic America down towards Cape Farewell, and in the 
following centuries the old legends and poems of the Eskimo and 
their strange art of singing flourished on the coast vis-a-vis Iceland, 
on the other side of the Denmark Straits, only ab. 170 (English) 
miles in width, that separate the two enormous islands, and through 
which the never resting polar ice current runs its fatal course to- 
wards its dissolution south of Cape Farewell. Behind this current 
are situated the secluded fiords and islands which the medieval 
Icelanders knew by the names of the Krosseyar (‘the cross-isles’) and 
the Gunnbjorn-rocks, perhaps the first discovered localities in the 
New World, on the eastcoast of Greenland.’ The Eskimo soon took 
possession of them preserving here their heathen civilisation un- 
known to our world, and ignorant themselves of the latter’s existence. 
1 These localities have recently been identified by С. Holm, the former as the 
large island where now is located the Danish colony Angmagsalik, together with 
adjoining islands, the latter as some smaller islands close by, to the north. 
(Meddelelser om Gronland vol. 56, 1918, pp. 290—308.) 
