Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature

by Unknown

AMERICANA

The Norse Adventures

“What parts of the American coasts that adventurous Icelander, Bjarne Herjulfson, saw cannot be determined with certainty,” says that learned antiquarian, Professor R. B. Anderson, “but from the circumstances of the voyage, the course of the winds, the direction of the currents, and the presumed distance between each sight of land, there is reason to believe that the first land that Bjarne saw in the year 986 was the present Nantucket; the second, Nova Scotia; and the third, Newfoundland. Thus he was the first European whose eyes beheld any part of the American continent.”

But Bjarne made no exploration of the shores, and could take back no definite report of them. What little he had to say, however, stimulated the curiosity of Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red, and aroused a determination to go in quest of the unknown lands. He bought Bjarne’s ship and set sail, in the year 1000, with a crew of thirty-five men, far away to the southwest of Greenland. They landed in Helluland (Newfoundland), afterwards in Markland (Nova Scotia), and eventually found their way to the shores of Massachusetts Bay, or Buzzard’s Bay, or Narragansett Bay, the exact locality being disputed by local antiquarians. The likelihood seems to favor Fall River. Finding abundance of grapes, they called the place of their sojourn Vinland. They remained there two years, and on their return to Greenland, another expedition was fitted out by Leif’s brother Thorwald. But Leif is entitled to the credit of being the first pale-faced man who planted his feet on the American continent.

The Icelandic Sagas

The old Norse narrative writings are called “Sagas,” a word which, as John Fiske remarks, we are in the habit of using in English as equivalent to legendary or semi-mythical narratives. To cite a saga as authority for a statement seems, therefore, to some people as inadmissible as to cite a fairy-tale. In the class of Icelandic sagas to which that of Erik the Red belongs, we have quiet and sober narrative, not in the least like a fairy-tale, but often much like a ship’s log. Whatever such narrative may be, it is not folk-lore. These sagas are divisible into two well-marked classes. In the one class are the mythical or romantic sagas, composed of legendary materials; they belong essentially to the literature of folk-lore. In the other class are the historical sagas, with their biographies and annals. These writings give us history, and often very good history. They come down to us in a narrative form which stamps them as accurate and trustworthy chronicles.

Foreknowledge

Strenuous efforts have been made in the interest of the Portuguese descendants of Columbus to depreciate the importance of the Norse discoveries of America. Not only has the Americanist Society—whose members devote much of their time to the study of the pre-Columbian history of the Western Continent—traced in genuine sagas full particulars of the voyages and settlements of the Norsemen, from the first expedition in 986 to the last in 1347, but they have shown that Columbus, during a visit to Iceland in 1477, must have been informed of the Norse discoveries, and must have profited by the knowledge thus acquired.

Erikson and Columbus

If we are bound by circumstances to put Columbus in the forefront, we are not bound to ignore an early discovery for the reality of which there is so much authentic evidence. Sceptical comments come from critics who have not sufficient knowledge of Norse customs or of Norse literature, and are consequently not in a position to judge fairly the amount of credence to be put in Scandinavian tradition. Experience with oral tradition as exhibited among the Aryans of India might have suggested that the old Western mistrust of that method of transmitting information was founded in ignorance alone. For we now know that it is quite possible to hand down the longest statements through ages, without loss or change. But in the present case the written word has come in aid of oral tradition, and the oldest records of Leif Erikson’s discovery of Vinland are so near the period of the event that the chain of testimony may be regarded as practically complete. It is all but certain that Leif Erikson landed on the main continent, whereas it is not at all certain, but extremely problematical, whether Columbus ever saw, much less set foot on, the continent of America. The probability is that he did not get nearer than the Bahamas.