But even if we are obliged to abandon the Saga of Eric the Red[52] and the other descriptions of these voyages as historical documents, this is compensated by the increase in our admiration for the extraordinary powers of realistic description in Icelandic literature. In reading Eric’s Saga one cannot help being struck by the way in which many of the events are so described, often in a few words, that the whole thing is before one’s eyes and it is difficult to believe that it has not actually occurred. This is just the same quality that characterises our Norwegian fairy-tales: all that is supernatural is made so natural and realistic that it is brought straight before one. The Icelanders created the realistic novel; and at a time when the prose style of Europe was still in its infancy their prose narrative often reaches the summit of clear simplicity. In part this may doubtless be explained by their not being merely authors, but men of action; their presentment acquired the stamp of real life and the brevity that belongs to the narrator of things seen. And to this, of course, must be added the fact that as a rule the tales were sifted and abridged by generations of oral transmission. In later times this style became corrupted by European influence.
Postscript
After I had given, on October 7, 1910, the outlines of this examination of the sagas of the Wineland voyages before the Scientific Society of Christiania, attention was called in Sweden, by Professor F. Läffler, to the fact that the Swedish philologist, Professor Sven Söderberg, whose early death in 1901 is much to be regretted, had announced views about Wineland similar to those at which I have arrived. The manuscript of a lecture that he delivered on the subject at Lund in May 1898, but which was never printed, was then found, and has been published in the “Sydsvenska Dagbladet Snällposten” for October 30, 1910. As I have thus become acquainted with this interesting inquiry too late to be able to include it in my examination, I think it right to mention it here.
Professor Söderberg thinks, as I do, that there can be no doubt about the Norsemen having discovered a part of North America; but he looks upon the tales of the wine and everything connected therewith as later inventions. He maintains that the name of “Vinland” originally meant grass-land or pasture-land (from the old Norse word “vin” == pasture), therefore something similar to the meaning of Greenland, and that it may have been the name of a country discovered in the west. Curiously enough, I took at first the same view, and thought too that Adam of Bremen might have misunderstood such a word, just as Söderberg thinks; but I allowed myself to be convinced by the linguistic objection that the word “vin” (pasture) seems to have gone out of use before the eleventh century (cf. vol. i. p. 367). However, Söderberg’s reasons for supposing that the word was still in use appear to have weight; and he also makes it probable that the name formed thereby might be Vinland and not Vinjarland. (In support of this Mr. A. Kiær gave me as an example the Norwegian name Vinås.) Professor Söderberg then thinks that Adam of Bremen heard this name in Denmark, and, misinterpreting it as a foreigner to mean the land of wine, himself invented the explanation of the country’s being so called. Söderberg gives several striking examples to show how this kind of “etymologising” was just in Adam’s spirit (e.g., Sconia or Skåne is derived from Old German “sconi” or “schön”; Greenland comes from the inhabitants being bluish-green in the face, etc.). An example from a country lying near Denmark, which appears to me even more striking than those given by Söderberg, is Adam’s explanation of Kvænland as the Land of Women (cf. vol. i. pp. 186, f., 383), the Wizzi as white people, or Albanians, the Huns as dogs, etc. Söderberg has difficulty in explaining the statement about the unsown corn in Wineland; but if he had noticed Isidore’s description of the Insulæ Fortunatæ with the self-grown vine and the wild-growing corn, he would have found a perfectly natural explanation of this also. If Adam had misunderstood a “Vinland” (== grass-land), and then perhaps Finland (Finmark, cf. vol i. p. 382), as meaning the land of wine, it would be just in his spirit to transfer thither Isidore’s description of the Insulæ Fortunatæ; a parallel case is that in interpreting Kvænland as Womanland he transfers thither the myth of the Amazons and its fables, and this in spite of its being a country on the Baltic about which it must have been comparatively easy for him to obtain information. In the same way he transfers to the “island” of Halagland, mentioned immediately before Wineland, an erroneous account of the midnight sun and the winter night taken from older writers (cf. vol. i. p. 194, note 2). But one reason for thinking that “Vinland” really meant the land of wine as early as that time is the circumstance put forward above (vol. i. p. 365), that at about the same time there occurs a Grape-island in the Navigatio Brandani.
Professor Söderberg then goes through the Icelandic accounts of Wineland, and points out, in the same way as has been done in this chapter, that the oldest authorities have nothing remarkable to report about the country, and do not mention wine there, and he rightly lays stress on this being particularly significant in the case of Snorre Sturlason,
“knowing as we do how prone Snorre is to digress from his proper subject, when he has anything really interesting to communicate. The reason must be that he did not know anything particularly remarkable about Wineland; and without doubt this is due to his not having known Adam of Bremen. It has, in fact, been shown that Snorre has not a single statement from Adam.”
Later, Söderberg thinks, Adam of Bremen’s fourth book became known in Iceland, and on the foundation of that the tale of Leif’s discovery of the country with the wine and corn arose, and the later sagas developed, especially that of Thorfinn Karlsevne’s voyage, which he thinks in the main “rests on a truthful foundation,” though he points out that a particular feature like that of the two Scottish runners must be “pure invention, or rather ... borrowed from another saga.” If Professor Söderberg had remarked how most of the incidents in this saga are spurious, he would have found even stronger support for his views in this fact.