The third voyage, according to both the Hauksbók and Sturlubók, was made by a great Viking named Floki Vilgerdarson. He fitted out in Rogaland to seek Gardarsholm (or Snowland). He took with him three ravens which
“were to show him the way, since seafaring men had no ‘leidarstein’ [lodestone, magnetic needle] at that time in the North....” “He came first to Hjaltland [Shetland] and lay in Floka-bay. There Geirhild, his daughter, was drowned in Geirhilds-lake.” “Floki then sailed to the Faroes, and there gave his [other] daughter in marriage. From her is come Trond in Gata. Thence he sailed out to sea with the three ravens.... And when he let loose the first it flew back astern [i.e., towards the Faroes]. The second flew up into the air and back to the ship. The third flew forward over the prow, where they found the land. They came to it on the east at Horn. They then sailed along the south of the land. But when they were sailing to the west of Reykjanes and the fjord opened up, so that they saw Snæfellsnes, Faxi These three voyages of discovery are supposed to have taken place about 860-870. A few years after that time began the permanent settlement of the country by Norwegians; according to the chronicles this was initiated by Ingolf Arnarson with his establishment at Reykjarvik (about the year 874), which is mentioned as early as Are Frode (see above, [p. 253]), and this establishment may be more historical. Harold Fairhair’s conquest of the whole of Norway, of which he made one kingdom, and his hard-handed procedure may have been partly responsible for the emigration of Norwegians to the poorer island of Iceland; many of the chiefs preferred to live a harder life there than to remain at home under Harold’s dominion. A larger part of the settlers, and among them many of the best, had first emigrated from Norway to the Scottish isles and to Ireland, but on account of troubles moved once more to Iceland.[236] As has been suggested already ([p. 167]), there was probably, besides the Irish priests, some Celtic population before the Norwegians arrived, which gave Celtic names to various places in the country. The omission of any mention of these Celts, with the exception of the “Papar,” in the Landnáma is no more surprising than the strange silence about the primitive people of Greenland, whom we now know with certainty to have been in the country when the Icelanders came thither. THE DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT OF GREENLAND BY THE NORWEGIANS Oldest authority on Greenland The earliest mention of Greenland known in literature is that found in Adam of Bremen (see above, [p. 194]). It was written about a hundred years after the probable settlement of the country, and shows that at least the name had reached Denmark at that time. In another passage of his work Adam says that “emissaries from Iceland, Greenland and the Orkneys” came to Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen “with requests that he would send preachers to them.” Greenland. The shaded parts along the coast are not covered by Are Frode, circa 1120 The oldest Icelandic account of the discovery of Greenland, and of the people settling there, is found in Are Frode’s Íslendingabók (c. 1130). He had it from his uncle, Thorkel Gellisson, who had been in Greenland and had conversed with a man who himself had accompanied Eric the Red thither. Thorkel lived in the second half of the eleventh century, and “remembered far back.” Are’s statements have thus a good authority, and they may be regarded as fairly trustworthy, at all events in their main outlines; for the events were no more remote than a couple of generations, and accounts of them may still have been extant in Iceland. Unfortunately the records that have come down to us, from the hand of Are himself, are very brief. He says:
the inland ice, which otherwise covers the whole of the interior