SAGA MANUSCRIPT.
This is a portion of one of the plates in the Antiquitates Americanæ, given by Rafn to Charles Sumner, with a key in manuscript by Rafn himself. His signature is from a copy of his Mémoire given by him to Edward Everett, and now in Harvard College library.
In regard to the credibility of the sagas, the northern writers recognize the change which came over the oral traditionary chronicles when the romancing spirit was introduced from the more southern countries, at a time while the copies of the sagas which we now have were making, after having been for so long a time orally handed down; but they are not so successful in making plain what influence this imported spirit had on particular sagas, which we are asked to receive as historical records. They seem sometimes to forget that it is not necessary to have culture, heroes, and impossible occurrences to constitute a myth. A blending of history and myth prompts Horn to say “that some of the sagas were doubtless originally based on facts, but the telling and re-telling have changed them into pure myths.” The unsympathetic stranger sees this in stories that the patriotic Scandinavians are over-anxious to make appear as genuine chronicles.[597] It is certainly unfortunate that the period of recording the older sagas coincides mainly with the age of this southern romancing influence.[598] It is a somewhat anomalous condition when long-transmitted oral stories are assigned to history, and certain other written ones of the age of the recorded sagas are relegated to myth. If we would believe some of the northern writers, what appears to be difference in kind of embellishment was in reality the sign that separated history from fable.[599] Of the interpreters of this olden lore, Torfæus has been long looked upon as a characteristic exemplar, and Horn[600] says of his works that they are “perceptibly lacking in criticism. Torfæus was upon the whole incapable of distinguishing between myth and history.”[601]
RUIN AT KATORTOK.
After a cut in Nordenskjöld’s Exped. till Grönland, p. 371, following the Meddel. om Grönland, vi. 98.
Erasmus Rask, in writing to Wheaton in 1831,[602] enumerates eight of the early manuscripts which mention Vinland and the voyages; but Rafn, in 1837, counted eighteen such manuscripts.[603] We know little or nothing about the recorders or date of any of these copies, excepting the Heimskringla,[604] nor how long they had existed orally. Some of them were doubtless put into writing soon after the time when such recording was introduced, and this date is sometimes put as early as a.d. 1120, and sometimes as late as the middle or even end of that century. Meanwhile, Adam of Bremen, in the latter part of the eleventh century (a.d. 1073), prepared his Historia Ecclesiastica, an account of the spread of Christianity in the north, in which he says he was told by the Danish king that his subjects had found a country to the west, called Winland.[605] A reference is also supposed to be made in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis, written about the middle (say a.d. 1140) of the twelfth century. But it was not until somewhere between a.d. 1385 and 1400 that the oldest Icelandic manuscript which exists, touching the voyages, was compiled,—the so-called Codex Flatoyensis,[606] though how much earlier copies of it were made is not known. It is in this manuscript that we find the saga of Olaf Tryggvesson,[607] wherein the voyages of Leif Ericson are described, and it is only by a comparison of circumstances detailed here and in other sagas that the year a.d. 1000 has been approximately determined as the date.[608] In this same codex we find the saga of Eric the Red, one of the chief narratives depended upon by the advocates of the Norse discovery, and in Rask’s judgment it “appears to be somewhat fabulous, written long after the event, and taken from tradition.”[609]
Note.—The above is a reproduction of a corner map in the map of Danish Greenland given in Rink’s book of that name. The sea in the southwest corner of the cut is not shaded; but shading is given to the interior ice field on the northern and northeastern part of the map. Rink gives a similar map of the Westerbygd.