“the said barbarian runs down to the beach bearing a long pair of tongs in his hand with a fiery mass in a skin[10] of immense size and heat; he instantly throws it after the servants of Christ, but it did not injure them, it went over them about a stadium farther off, but when it fell into the sea, the water began to boil as though a fire-spouting mountain were there, and smoke arose from the sea as fire from a baker’s oven.” The other inhabitants then rush out and throw their masses of fire, but Brendan and the brethren escape [Schröder, 1871, p. 28].
In the narrative of Maelduin’s voyage a similar story is told of the smith who with a pair of tongs throws a fiery mass over the boat, so that the sea boils, but he does not hit them, as they hastily fly out into the open sea [cf. Zimmer, 1889, pp. 163, 329]. The resemblances to Karlsevne and his people flying with all speed before the black ball of the Skrælings, like a sheep’s paunch, which is flung over them from a pole and makes an ugly noise when it falls, is obvious; but at the same time it looks as though this incident of the Irish myth—which is an echo of the classical Cyclopes of the Æneid and Odyssey (cf. Polyphemus and the Cyclopes), and the great stones that were thrown at Odysseus—had been “modernised” by the saga-writer, who has transferred mediæval European catapults and explosives to the Indians.
The curious expression—used when the Skrælings come in the spring for the second time to Karlsevne’s settlement—that they came rowing in a multitude of hide canoes, “as many as though [the sea] had been sown with coal before the Hóp” [i.e., the bay], seems to find its explanation in some tale like that of the “Imram Brenaind” [cf. Zimmer, 1889, p. 138], where Brandan and his companions come to a small deserted land, and the harbour they entered was immediately filled with “demons in the form of pygmies and dwarfs, who were as black as coal.”
The “hellustein” (flat stone) which lay fixed in the skull of the fallen Thorbrand Snorrason is a curious missile, and reminds one of trolls (cf. Arab myth, [chapter xiii.]). Features such as that of the Skrælings being supposed to know that white shields meant peace and red ones war have an altogether European effect.[11]
Another purely legendary feature in the description of the fight is that of Freydis frightening the Skrælings by taking her breasts out of her sark and whetting the sword on them (“ok slettir á sverdit”). As it stands in the saga this incident is not very comprehensible, and appears to have been borrowed from elsewhere. Possibly, as Moltke Moe thinks, it may be connected in some way with the legend of the wood-nymph with the long breasts who was pursued by the hunter. The mention of Unipeds and “Einfötinga-land” shows that classical myths have also been adopted. The idea was, moreover, widely current in the Middle Ages. Thus in the so-called Nancy map of Claudius Clavus (of about 1426) we find “unipedes maritimi” in the extreme north-east of Greenland. In the “Heimslýsing” in the Hauksbók [F. Jónsson, 1892, p. 166] and in the “Rymbegla” [1780] “Einfötingar” are mentioned with a foot “so large that they shade themselves from the sun with it while asleep” (cf. also Adam of Bremen, vol. i. p. 189). But in the Saga of Eric the Red the incident of the Uniped and the pursuit of him are described as realistically as the encounters with the Skrælings. Einfötinga-land is also mentioned in the same manner as Skrælinga-land in its vicinity.
The Skrælings are originally mythical beings
In reading the Icelandic sagas and narratives about Wineland and Greenland one cannot avoid being struck by the remarkable, semi-mythical way in which the natives, the Skrælings, are always spoken of;[12] even Are Frode’s mention of them appears strange. Through finding the connection between Wineland the Good and the Fortunate Isles, and between the latter again and the lands of the departed, the “huldrelands,” fairylands, and the lands of the Irish “síd,” I arrived at the kindred idea that perhaps Skræling was originally a name for those gnomes or brownies or mythical beings, and that it was these that Are Frode meant by the people who “were inhabiting Wineland”—and further, that when the Icelanders in Greenland found a strange, small, foreign-looking people, with hide canoes and implements of stone, bone and wood, which also looked strange to them, they naturally regarded them as these same Skrælings; and then they may afterwards have found similar people (Eskimo, and perhaps Indians) on the coast of America. It agrees with the view of the Skrælings as a small people that elves and brownies in Norway were small, often only two or three feet high, and that the underground or huldre-folk in Skåne were called “Pysslingar” (dwarfs). This idea that the Skræling was originally a brownie was strengthened by the discovery of the above-mentioned probable connection between many features in the description of the Skrælings’ appearance in Wineland and the demons, like pygmies and dwarfs, that Brandan meets with in a land in the sea (see [p. 10]), and the smiths (or Cyclopes) in another island who throw masses of fire at Brandon and Maelduin (see [p. 9]). That Unipeds and Skrælings are both mentioned as equally real inhabitants of the new countries, and that a Uniped even kills Thorvald Ericson near Wineland, and is pursued, points in the same direction.
Eskimos cutting up a whale. Woodcut from Greenland,
illustrating a fairy-tale; drawn and engraved by a native
I then asked Professor Alf Torp whether he knew of anything that might confirm such an interpretation of the word Skræling; he at once mentioned the German word “walt-schreckel” for a wood-troll, and afterwards wrote to me as follows: