R. H. Major’s Study of the Zeno Narrative
Major endeavored to end the long-standing discussion as to the authenticity of the map and the narrative of voyages by an elaborate and ingenious study, on the hypothesis of an honestly intended reproduction, the various additions, interpolations, and changes being due partly to misunderstandings by the original Zeno brothers, partly to injuries accidentally inflicted by the compiler and inaccurately repaired, and partly to extraneous matter of illustration and ornament, which the later Nicolò Zeno had not the self-control to withhold. This method of exposition leads to some curious experiences of prodigious exaggeration backed by a veritable genius for transforming words. Thus when we read that Zichmni, ruling in Porlanda and conqueror of Frisland, made successful war on his feudal superior, the King of Norway, it means, according to Major, that Henry St. Clair (or Sinclair), who was given the Earldom of the Orkneys in 1379, had a skirmish with a forgotten claimant to a part of his territory. A little later in the narrative a warm spring (108° maximum) on an island of a fiord in the inhabited part of Greenland, beside which some ruins are found, evolves a monastery and monk-ruled village of dome-topped houses on the slope of a volcanic mountain far up the impossible ice-bound eastern coast, with house-warming, cooking, and hothouse gardening by subterranean heat and a continual commerce maintained with northern Europe—though all this had never been heard of before. It is true that Major was handicapped by a belief, formerly prevalent, that the eastern coast of Greenland was the site of the Eastern Settlement of the Norsemen, though in modern times that coast is subjected to conditions which make life hardly practicable; whereas it is now conclusively established that both of the Norse settlements were on the relatively pleasant southwestern coast, one settlement being more easterly and the other more westerly. But at the best such interpretations run the gauntlet of the reader’s involuntary skepticism. It is often easier to discard the statements altogether.