“he lay gazing up into the air with wide-open mouth and nostrils, scratching and pinching himself and muttering something. They asked why he lay there. He answered that that did not concern anybody, and told them not to meddle with it; he had for the most part lived so, said he, that they had no need to trouble about him. They asked him to come home with them, and he did so.”
In the Flateyjarbók’s “Grönlendinga-þáttr” Tyrker was lost in the woods, and when Leif and his men went in search and found him again, he too behaved strangely.
“First he spoke for a long time in ‘þýrsku,’ and rolled his eyes many ways and twisted his mouth; but they could not make out what he said. After a while he said in Norse: I did not go much farther, and yet I have a new discovery to tell of; I have found vines and grapes (‘vínvið ok vínber’).”
This shows how features taken from legends originally altogether different are mingled together in these sagas, in order to fill out the description; and it shows too how the same tale may take entirely different forms. Of Tyrker we hear further that “he was ‘brattleitr’ (with a flat face and abrupt forehead), had fugitive eyes, was freckled (‘smáskitligr’) in the face, small of stature and puny, but skilful in all kinds of dexterity.” Thorhall, on the other hand, “was tall of stature, dark and troll-like,” etc. (see [p. 320]), but he was also master of many crafts, was well acquainted with the uninhabited regions, and altogether had qualities different from most people. Both had long been with Eric the Red. There can scarcely be a doubt that these two legendary figures, perhaps originally derived from wholly different spheres, have been blended together.
The stranded whale
The whale that is driven ashore and that they feed on resembles the great fish that is cast ashore and that the Irish saint Brandan and his companions live on in the tale of his wonderful voyage (see below). This resemblance is confirmed by the statement in the Icelandic story that no one knew what kind of whale it was, not even Karlsevne, who had great experience of whales. There are, of course, no whales on the north-eastern coast of America that are not also found on the coasts of Greenland and Iceland; the incident therefore appears fictitious. The great whale in the legend of Brandan, on the other hand, is a fabulous monster. There is this distinction, it is true, that Karlsevne’s people fall ill from eating the whale,[324] while it saves the lives of the Irish voyagers; but in both cases it is driven ashore after God, or a god, has been invoked in their need, and disappears again immediately (in the tale of Brandan it is devoured by wild beasts; in the saga it is thrown over the cliff). This difference can easily be explained by the whale in the Norse story having been sent by a heathen god, so that it was sacrilege to eat of it. In the tale of Brandan the whale is perhaps derived from Oriental legends [cf. De Goeje, 1891, p. 63]; it may, however, be a common northern feature.
Eggs in the autumn and egg-gathering
When it is stated of Straumsfjord that there were places where eggs could be gathered, and of Straumsey that “there were so many birds that one could scarcely put one’s foot down between the eggs,” this is evidently an entirely northern feature, brought in to decorate the tale, and brought in so infelicitously that they are made to find all this mass of eggs there in the autumn (!) when they arrive. If Straumsfjord was in Nova Scotia there could not be eider-ducks nor gulls either[325] in sufficient number to form breeding-grounds of importance, and among sea-birds one would be more inclined to think of terns, as Professor R. Collett has suggested to me. As the coast is not described as one with steep cliffs, and there is mention of stepping between the eggs, auks, guillemots and similar sea-birds are out of the question, even if they occurred so far south.
Wineland the equivalent of Fortunate Isles
But then comes the most important part of the saga, the description of the country itself, where grew self-sown fields of wheat, and vines on the hills, where no snow fell and the cattle were out the whole winter, where the streams and the sea teemed with fish and the woods were full of deer.