Discovering the New World. Julius E. Olson
“Winter-night-tide” was about the middle of October.
14 The home of Eric the Red, in the Eastern Settlement.
15 This was evidently the first time that the voyage from Greenland to Norway was accomplished without going by way of Iceland, and was a remarkable achievement. The aim was evidently to avoid the dangerous passage between Greenland and Iceland.
16 A reference to some strange happenings in the winter of 1000-1001 at the Icelandic farmstead Froda, as related in the Eyrbyggja Saga.
17 Of the year 999.
18 King Olaf ruled from 995 to 1000. He fell at the battle of Svolder (in the Baltic) in September, 1000. It was in the same year that Leif started out as the King’s missionary to Greenland.
19 A wild cereal of some sort. Fiske is convinced that it was Indian corn, while Storm thinks it was wild rice, contending with much force that Indian corn was a product entirely unknown to the explorers, and that they could not by any possibility have confused it with wheat, even if they had found it. There is, moreover, no indication in this saga that they found cultivated fields. Storm cites Sir William Alexander, Encouragement to Colonies (1624), who, in speaking of the products of Nova Scotia, refers, among other things, to “some eares of wheate, barly and rie growing there wild.” He also cites Jacques Cartier, who, in 1534, found in New Brunswick “wild grain like rye, which looked as though it had been sowed and cultivated.” See Reeves, p. 174, (50).
20 Supposed to be maple.
21 Also called Thorhild.
22 That is, were near Ireland.
23 The display of an axe seems to have been thought efficacious in laying fetches. See Reeves, p. 171, (39), citing a passage from another saga.
24 Thorfinn Karlsefni, the explorer of the Vinland expeditions, was of excellent family. His lineage is given at greater length in the Landnama-bok (Book of Settlements).
25 Usually called Gudrid.
26 There is doubt as to why the expedition sailed northwest to the Western Settlement. Possibly Thorfinn desired to make a different start than Thorstein, whose expedition was a failure. See Reeves, p. 172, (45).
27 Dœgr was a period of twelve hours. Reeves quotes the following from an old Icelandic work: “In the day there are two dœgr; in the dœgr twelve hours.” A dœgr’s sailing is estimated to have been about one hundred miles. There is evidently a clerical error in this passage after the number of days’ sailing. The words for “two” and “seven” are very similar in old Norse.
28 The language of the vellum AM. 557 is somewhat different in this and the previous sentence. It does not say that “they sailed southward along the land for a long time, and came to a cape,” but, “when two dœgr had elapsed, they descried land, and they sailed off this land; there was a cape to which they came. They beat into the wind along this coast, having the land upon the starboard side. This was a bleak coast, with long and sandy shores. They went ashore in boats, and found the keel of a ship, so they called it Keelness there; they likewise gave a name to the strands and called them Wonderstrands, because they were long to sail by.”
29 AM. 557 says biafal. Neither word has been identified.
30 Hauk’s Book says “eider-ducks.”
31 The god Thor.
32 The prose sense is: “Men promised me, when I came hither, that I should have the best of drink; it behooves me before all to blame the land. See, oh, man! how I must raise the pail; instead of drinking wine, I have to stoop to the spring” (Reeves).
33 The prose sense is: “Let us return to our countrymen, leaving those who like the country here, to cook their whale on Wonder-strand.” From an archaic form in these lines it is apparent that they are older than either of the vellums, and must have been composed at least a century before Hauk’s Book was written; they may well be much older than the beginning of the thirteenth century (Reeves). The antiquity of the verses of the saga is also attested by a certain metrical irregularity, as in poetry of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries (Storm).
34 In the next sentence the authority for this doubtful statement seems to be placed upon “traders.”
35 Note the word “hollows” with reference to the contention that “wild wheat” is “wild rice.”
36 “Skin-canoes,” or kayaks, lead one to think of Eskimos. Both Storm and Fiske think that the authorities of the saga-writer may have failed to distinguish between bark-canoes and skin-canoes.
37 The vellum AM. 557 says “small men” instead of “swarthy men.” The explorers called them Skrælingar, a disparaging epithet, meaning inferior people, i.e., savages. The name is applied, in saga literature, to the natives of Greenland as well as to the natives of Vinland. Storm thinks the latter were the Micmac Indians of Nova Scotia.
38 “Lescarbot, in his minute and elaborate description of the Micmacs of Acadia, speaks with some emphasis of their large eyes. Dr. Storm quite reasonably suggests that the Norse expression may refer to the size not of the eyeball but of the eye-socket, which in the Indian face is apt to be large.” Fiske, The Discovery of America, p. 190.
39 This would seem to place Vinland farther south than Nova Scotia, but not necessarily. Storm cites the Frenchman Denys, who as colonist and governor of Nova Scotia passed a number of years there, and in a work published in 1672 says of the inner tracts of the land east of Port Royal that “there is very little snow in the country, and very little winter.” He adds: “It is certain that the country produces the vine naturally, — that it bears a grape that ripens perfectly, the berry as large as the muscat.”
40 An animal unknown to the natives. As Fiske suggests, “It