| "Sjálfsána hveitiakra" | Rafn, p. 147.[Back to Main Text] |
| Self-sown wheat-acres |
Footnote 213: Dr. Storm makes perhaps too much of this presumption. He treats it as decisive against his own opinion that Vinland was the southern coast of Nova Scotia, and accordingly he tries to prove that the self-sown corn was not maize, but "wild rice" (Zizania aquatica). Mémoires, etc., p. 356. But his argument is weakened by excess of ingenuity.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 214: "Thar var svâ gódhr landskostr at thví er theim sýndist, at thar mundi eingi fènadhr fódhr thurfa á vetrum; thar kvomu eingi frost á vetrum, ok lítt rènudhu thar grös," i. e. "tanta autem erat terræ bonitas, ut inde intelligere esset, pecora hieme pabulo non indigere posse, nullis incidentibus algoribus hiemalibus, et graminibus parum flaccescentibus." Rafn, p. 32.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 215: "Thar voru their um vetrinn; ok gjördhist vetr mikill, en ekki fyri unnit ok gjördhist íllt til matarins, ok tókust af veidhirnar," i. e. "hic hiemarunt; cum vero magna incideret hiems, nullumque provisum esset alimentum, cibus cœpit deficere capturaque cessabat," Id. p. 174.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 216: A favourite method of determining the exact spots visited by the Northmen has been to compare their statements regarding the shape and trend of the coasts, their bays, headlands, etc., with various well-known points on the New England coast. It is a tempting method, but unfortunately treacherous, because the same general description will often apply well enough to several different places. It is like summer boarders in the country struggling to tell one another where they have been to drive,—past a school-house, down a steep hill, through some woods, and by a saw-mill, etc.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 217: It is not meant that stone implements did not continue to be used in some parts of Europe far into the Middle Ages. But this was not because iron was not perfectly well known, but because in many backward regions it was difficult to obtain or to work, so that stone continued in use. As my friend, Mr. T. S. Perry, reminds me, Helbig says that stone-pointed spears were used by some of the English at the battle of Hastings, and stone battle-axes by some of the Scots under William Wallace at the end of the thirteenth century. Die Italiker in der Poebene, Leipsic, 1879, p. 42. Helbig's statement as to Hastings is confirmed by Freeman, Norman Conquest of England, vol. iii. p. 473.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 218: My use of the word "inventing" is, in this connection, a slip of the pen. Of course the tales of "men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," the Sciopedæ, etc., as told by Sir John Mandeville, were not invented by the mediæval imagination, but copied from ancient authors. They may be found in Pliny, Hist. Nat., lib. vii., and were mentioned before his time by Ktesias, as well as by Hecatæus, according to Stephanus of Byzantium. Cf. Aristophanes, Aves, 1553; Julius Solinus, Polyhistor, ed. Salmasius, cap. 240. Just as these sheets are going to press there comes to me Mr. Perry's acute and learned History of Greek Literature, New York, 1890, in which this subject is mentioned in connection with the mendacious and medical Ktesias:—These stories have probably acquired a literary currency "by exercise of the habit, not unknown even to students of science, of indiscriminate copying from one's predecessors, so that in reading Mandeville we have the ghosts of the lies of Ktesias, almost sanctified by the authority of Pliny, who quoted them and thereby made them a part of mediæval folk-lore—and from folk-lore, probably, they took their remote start" (p. 522).[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 219: "En that var grávara ok safvali ok allskonar skinnavara" (Rafn, p. 59),—i. e. gray fur and sable and all sorts of skinwares; in another account, "skinnavöru ok algrá skinn," which in the Danish version is "skindvarer og ægte graaskind" (id. p. 150),—i. e. skinwares and genuine gray furs. Cartier in Canada and the Puritans in Massachusetts were not long in finding that the natives had good furs to sell.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 220: Rafn, p. 156.[Back to Main Text]