Gripla - 01.01.2003, Blaðsíða 257

ANDMÆLARÆÐUR
255
tallies with geographical, ethnographic and archeological facts. I would
therefore tend to agree with Gísli that the sagas may well have preserved quite
a lot of truthful information about sailing distances, vegetation, camping, na-
ture along the North American coast, the discovery of grapes, the confron-
tation with Skrælings, and various other such matters. Unlike Gísli, however,
I do not think that such information gives us any right to conclude, for
example, that Leifr Eiríksson and his people established their camp in L’Anse
aux Meadows in Newfoundland, or that they found grapes after having made
an expedition to the southem part of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Not only is
the information in the Vínland sagas much too vague and imprecise to allow
any such conclusions but it is also likely to have changed considerably in the
course of oral transmission. Furthermore, even though L’Anse aux Meadows
has now been established by archeologists as a genuine Viking settlement, we
cannot be certain that it was the only one — other such settlements may very
well be discovered in the future, and if that happens, those who want to find
out precisely where the Viking travellers landed will have to start their
calculations from the beginning again. I somehow suspect that Gísli has been
tempted by American Viking enthusiasts to speculate a bit more about these
matters than his good scholarly sense would normally permit him.
What is certain, however, is that the two Vínland sagas are both very much
based on oral tradition, and that at least parts of that oral tradition may be two
hundred years old and based on genuine memories from Viking expeditions to
North America. At least this much is clear from Gísli’s chapters about
Vínland, and even though several other scholars have said so before, Gísli’s
research has in some respects made this conclusion even more certain. At the
same time, Gísli is aware of the fact that both sagas are also to be regarded as
literary constructions from the 13th century. I would have liked him to analyse
these literary constructions a bit more than he does, because I think such
analysis may reveal more about the relationship between oral tradition and
literary authorship than even the most careful consideration of sailing routes
and archeological findings can do. In my opinion, Gísli’s method in the
section on “Sögur og sannleikur” is therefore not as convincing as his
method in the section on “Sagnaheimur Austfirðingasagna”. But he does
succeed in convincing me that the Vínland sagas are texts with deep oral roots.
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