“The land which is called Greenland was discovered and settled from Iceland. Eirik Raude [Eric the Red] was the name of a man from Breidafjord, who sailed thither from hence and there took land at the place which is since called Eiriksfjord. He gave the land a name and called it Greenland, and said that having a good name would entice men to go thither. They found there dwelling-sites of men, both in the east and the west of the country, and fragments of boats (‘keiplabrot’) and stone implements, so that one may judge from this that the same sort of people had been there as inhabited Wineland, whom the Greenlanders[237] call Skrælings.[238] Now this, when he betook himself to settling the country, was fourteen or fifteen winters before Christianity came here to Iceland,[239] according to what Thorkel Gellisson was told in Greenland by one who himself accompanied Eric the Red thither.”
It is strange that we only hear of traces left by the primitive people of Greenland, the Skrælings or Eskimo. This looks as though Eric the Red did not come across the people themselves, though this seems improbable. We shall return to this later, in a special chapter on them.
It is probable that in other works, which are now lost, Are Frode wrote in greater detail of the discovery of Greenland and its first settlement by the Icelanders, and that later authors, whose works are known to us, have drawn upon him; for where they speak of other events that are mentioned in Are’s Íslendingabók, the same expressions are often used, almost word for word. The oldest of the later accounts known to us, which give a more complete narrative of the discovery of Greenland, were written between 1200 and 1305. The Landnámabók may be specially mentioned; upon this is based the Saga of Eric the Red (also called Thorfinn Karlsevne’s Saga), written, according to the opinion of G. Storm, between the years 1270 and 1300, while Finnur Jónsson [1901] assigns it to the first half of the thirteenth century. By collating these various accounts we can form a picture of what took place; even though we must suppose that traditions which have been handed down orally for so long must in course of time have been considerably transformed—especially where they cannot have been based on well-known geographical conditions—and that they have received many a feature from other traditions, or from pure legend.
Gunnbjörn Ulfsson
Many accounts, both in Hauk’s Landnámabók and in the Sturlubók, and in other sagas, mention that Greenland was first discovered by the Norwegian Gunnbjörn, son of Ulf Kråka, shortly after the settlement of Iceland. On a voyage to Iceland, presumably about the year 900, he was carried out of his course to the west, and saw there a great country, and found certain islands or skerries, which were afterwards called “Gunnbjörnskerries.” These must have been off Greenland, most probably near Cape Farewell; but if it was late in the summer, in August or September, when there is little ice along the east coast, he may even have come close to the land farther north, and there found islands, at Angmagsalik, for instance. It is, however, of no great importance where it was; for when he saw that it was not Iceland that he had made, but a less hospitable country which did not look inviting for winter quarters, he probably sailed again at once, in order to reach his destination before the ice and the late season stopped him, without spending time in exploring the country. Whether Gunnbjörn established himself in Iceland we do not know; but it is recorded that his brother, Grimkell, took land at Snæfellsnes and was among the first settlers, and his sons, Gunnstein and Halldor, took land in the north-west on Isafjord.
Various later writers have interpreted this to mean that Gunnbjörnskerries lay to the west of Iceland, and far from the great land that Gunnbjörn saw; but the earliest notices (in the Hauksbók and Sturlubók) do not warrant such a view. It has even been suggested as possible that Gunnbjörnskerries lay in the ocean between Iceland and Greenland, but were destroyed later by a volcanic outbreak. In the Dutchman Ruysch’s map of 1508 an island is marked in this ocean, with the note that: “This island was totally consumed in the year 1456 A.D.”[240] It is inconceivable that such an island midway in the course between Iceland and Greenland should have entirely escaped mention in the oldest accounts of the voyages of Eric the Red and later settlers in Greenland, to say nothing of the circumstance that it would certainly have been mentioned in the ancient sailing-directions (e.g., in the Hauksbók and Sturlubók) for the voyage from Iceland to Greenland. Nor are there any known banks in this part of the ocean which might indicate that such an island had existed. It is in itself not the least unlikely that Gunnbjörn reached some islands of the Greenland coast, and that these in later tradition received the name of Gunnbjörnskerries.
That they were gradually transferred by tradition to a place where islands were no longer to be met with, or which in any case was unapproachable on account of ice, appears from the description of Greenland ascribed to Ivar Bárdsson (probably written in the fifteenth century), where we read:[241]
“Item from Snæfellsnes in Iceland, which is shortest to Greenland, two days’ and two nights’ sail, due west is the course, and there lie Gunnbjörnskerries right in mid-channel between Greenland and Iceland. This was the old course, but now ice has come from the gulf of the sea to the north-east [‘landnorden botnen’] so near to the said skerries, that none without danger to life can sail the old course, and be heard of again.”
Later in the same statement we read:
“Item when one sails from Iceland, one must take his course from Snæfellsnes ... and then sail due west one day and one night, very slightly to the south-west[242] to avoid the before-mentioned ice which lies off Gunnbjörnskerries, and then one day and one night due north-west, and thus he will come straight on the said highland Hvarf in Greenland.”