Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1940, Page 135

THE VINLAND VOYAGES
By Halldór Hermannsson.
Professor of Scandinavian languages at the Comell University, Ithaca, New York.
I.
THERE are few events in the history of the Scandinavian
nations which appeal so strongly to our imagination as
the discovery of Vinland. It is fascinating to think about
the intrepid sailors who in their excellent small craft and with-
out any mechanical aid to navigation were the first to cross the
Atlantic Ocean, and we are anxious to find out, if possible, where
they landed and whether they have left any traces behind in
the New World. Our chief authority so far for these voyages
is Icelandic writings of the thirteenth century, but unfortunately
they do not give us information sufficiently clear and detailed
to enable us to identify with any degree of certainty the places
mentioned there, or even to follow the approximate cour-
ses of these early voyages. And it increases the difficulty of
solving the problem that our principal sources do not agree in
their expositions of the events. This fact has by some modern
writers been used to discredit them altogether but it is entirely
unwarranted. On the contrary, strange as it may seem at first
glance, their very disagreement rather strengthens than otherwise
their authority, since it is not greater than so that we can clearly
discern the same tradition at the back of their stories, a tradition
which has taken on two different forms in different localities,
and these have finally been written down independent of each
other. Thus we have the confirmation of an oral tradition from
two different sides. Our task is to compare and closely examine
these two sources and to find out which represents the more
reliable form of the tradition, or whether, and to what extent,
they supplement each other. It has proved difficult to find an
answer to this question which could be generally accepted.
The two sources in question are, of course, the Saga of Erik
the Red (probably originally and more correctly called the Saga
of Thorfinn Karlsefni) and the Tale of the Greenlanders. As in
the case of most Icelandic prose works of the Middle Ages they
are both anonymous, the original manuscripts of them are lost,
and we have only copies to depend on; the date of the writing
°f the originals are consequently in doubt. Most critics consider
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