[598] Dasent translates from the preface to Egils Saga (Reikjavik, 1856): “The sagas show no wilful purpose to tell untruths, but simply are proofs of the beliefs and turns of thought of men in the age when the sagas were reduced to writing” (Burnt Njal, i. p. xiii).
[599] Rink (Danish Greenland, p. 3) says of the sagas that “they exist only in a fragmentary condition, and bear the general character of popular traditions to such a degree that they stand much in need of being corroborated by collateral proofs, if we are wholly to rely upon them in such a question as an ancient colonization of America.” So he proceeds to enumerate the kind of evidence, which is sufficient in Greenland, but is wholly wanting in other parts of America, and to point out that the trustworthiness of the sagas of the Vinland voyages exists only in regard to their general scope.
Dasent, in the introduction of Vigfússon’s Icelandic Dictionary, says of the sagas: “Written at various periods by scribes more or less fitted for the task, they are evidently of very varying authority.” The Scandinavian authorities class the sagas as mythical histories, as those relating to Icelandic history (subdivided into general, family, personal, ecclesiastical), and as the lives of rulers.
[600] Anderson’s translation, Lit. of the Scand. North, p. 81.
[601] Laing (Heimskringla, i. 23) says: “Arne Magnussen was the greatest antiquary who never wrote; his judgments and opinions are known from notes, selections, and correspondence, and are of great authority at this day in the saga literature. Torfæus consulted him in his researches.”
[602] Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 20.
[603] Oswald Moosmüller’s Europäer in Amerika vor Columbus (Regensburg, 1879, p. 4) enumerates the manuscripts in the royal library in Copenhagen.
[604] A. E. Wollheim’s Die Nat. lit. der Scandinavier (Berlin, 1875-77), p. 47. Turner’s Anglo Saxons, book iv. ch. 1. Mallet’s No. Antiq. (1847), 393
[605] Cf. G. H. Pertz, Monumenta Germaniæ historica, 1846, vol. vii. cap. 247. Of the different manuscripts, some call Vinland a “regio” and others an “insula.”
[606] Discovered in the seventeenth century in a monastery on an island close by the Icelandic coast, and now in the royal library in Copenhagen. Cf. Laing’s introduction to his edition of the Heimskringla, vol. i. p. 157. Horn says of this codex: “The book was written towards the end of the fourteenth century by two Icelandic priests, and contains in strange confusion and wholly without criticism a large number of sagas, poems, and stories. No other manuscript confuses things on so vast a scale.” Anderson’s translation of Horn’s Lit. of the Scandin. North, p. 60. Cf. Flateyjarbok. En Samling af Norske Konge-Sagaer med indskudte mindre fortællinger om Begivenheder i og Udenfor Norge samt Annaler (Christiania, 1860); and Vigfússon’s and Unger’s edition of 1868, also at Christiania. The best English account of the Codex Flatoyensis is by Gudbrand Vigfússon in the preface to his Icelandic Sagas, published under direction of the Master of the Rolls, London, 1887, vol. i. p. xxv.