Footnote 231: Schoolcraft, Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge, Philadelphia, 1860, 6 vols. 4to, vol. i. p. 89; a figure of this weapon is given in the same volume, plate xv. fig. 2, from a careful description by Chingwauk, an Algonquin chief.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 232: Rafn, p. 160; De Costa, p. 134; Storm, p. 330.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 233: Here the narrator seems determined to give us a genuine smack of the marvellous, for when the fleeing uniped comes to a place where his retreat seems cut off by an arm of the sea, he runs (glides, or hops?) across the water without sinking. In Vigfusson's version, however, the marvellous is eliminated, and the creature simply runs over the stubble and disappears. The incident is evidently an instance where the narrative has been "embellished" by introducing a feature from ancient classical writers. The "Monocoli," or one-legged people, are mentioned by Pliny, Hist. Nat., vii. 2: "Item hominum genus qui Monocoli vocarentur, singulis cruribus, miræ pernicitatis ad saltum." Cf. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticæ, viii. 4.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 234: Between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla, June 15, 1608. For the description, with its droll details, see Purchas his Pilgrimes, iii. 575.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 235: Proceedings Mass. Hist. Soc., December, 1887.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 236: I used this argument twenty years ago in qualification of the over-zealous solarizing views of Sir G. W. Cox and others. See my Myths and Mythmakers, pp. 191-202; and cf. Freeman on "The Mythical and Romantic Elements in Early English History," in his Historical Essays, i. 1-39.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 237: Curtin, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, pp. 12, 204, 303; Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts, pp. 203-311.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 238: Nowhere can you find a more masterly critical account of Icelandic literature than in Vigfusson's "Prolegomena" to his edition of Sturlunga Saga, Oxford, 1878, vol. i. pp. ix.-ccxiv. There is a good but very brief account in Horn's History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North, transl. by R. B. Anderson, Chicago, 1884, pp. 50-70.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 239: It is printed in Rafn, pp. 84-187, and in Grönlands historiske Mindesmærker, i. 352-443. The most essential part of it may now be found, under its own name, in Vigfusson's Icelandic Prose Reader, pp. 123-140.[Back to Main Text]
Footnote 240: It belonged to a man who lived on Flat Island, in one of the Iceland fiords.[Back to Main Text]