The other principal saga is that of Thorfinn Karlsefne, which with some differences and with the same lack of authenticity, goes over the ground covered by that of Eric the Red.[610]
RAFN.
Of all the early manuscripts, the well-known Heimskringla of Snorro Sturleson (b. 1178; d. 1241), purporting to be a history of the Norse kings down to a.d. 1177, is the most entitled to be received as an historical record, and all that it says is in these words: “Leif also found Vinland the Good.”[611]
Saxo Grammaticus (d. about 1208) in his Historia Danica begins with myths, and evidently follows the sagas, but does not refer to them except in his preface.[612]
For about five hundred years after this the stories attracted little or no attention.[613] We have seen that Peringskiöld produced these sagas in 1697. Montanus in his Nieuwe en onbekende Weereld (Amsterdam, 1671), and Campanius, in 1702, in his Kort Beskrifning om Provincien Nya Swerige uti America (Stockholm),[614] gave some details. The account which did most, however, to revive an interest in the subject was that of Torfæus in his Historia Vinlandiæ Antiquæ (Copenhagen, 1705), but he was quite content to place the scene of his narrative in America, without attempting to identify localities.[615] The voyages were, a few years later, the subject of a dissertation at the University of Upsala in Sweden.[616] J. P. Cassell, of Bremen, discusses the Adam of Bremen story in another Latin essay, still later.[617]
About 1750, Pieter Kalm, a Swede, brought the matter to the attention of Dr. Franklin, as the latter remembered twenty-five years later, when he wrote to Samuel Mather that “the circumstances gave the account a great appearance of authenticity.”[618] In 1755, Paul Henri Mallet (1730-1807), in his Histoire de Dannemarc, determines the localities to be Labrador and Newfoundland.[619]
In 1769, Gerhard Schöning, in his Norges Riges Historie, established the scene in America. Robertson, in 1777, briefly mentions the voyages in his Hist. of America (note xvii.), and, referring to the accounts given by Peringskiöld, calls them rude and confused, and says that it is impossible to identify the landfalls, though he thinks Newfoundland may have been the scene of Vinland. This is also the belief of J. R. Forster in his Geschichte der Entdeckungen im Norden (Frankfurt, 1784).[620] M. C. Sprengel, in his Geschichte der Europäer in Nordamerika (Leipzig, 1782), thinks they went as far south as Carolina. Pontoppidan’s History of Norway was mainly followed by Dr. Jeremy Belknap in his American Biography (Boston, 1794), who recognizes “circumstances to confirm and none to disprove the relations.” In 1793, Muñoz, in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo, put Vinland in Greenland. In 1796 there was a brief account in Fritsch’s Disputatio historico-geographica in qua quæritur utrum veteres Americam noverint necne. H. Stenström published at Lund, in 1801, a short dissertation, De America Norvegis ante tempora Columbi adita. Boucher de la Richarderie, in his Bibliothèque Universelle des Voyages (Paris, 1808), gives a short account, and cites some of the authorities. Some of the earlier American histories of this century, like Williamson’s North Carolina, took advantage of the recitals of Torfæus and Mallet. Ebenezer Henderson’s Residence in Iceland (1814-15)[621] presented the evidence anew. Barrow, in his Voyages to the Arctic Regions (London, 1818), places Vinland in Labrador or Newfoundland; but J. W. Moulton, in his History of the State of New York (N. Y., 1824), brings that State within the region supposed to have been visited.