[663] So plain a matter as the length of the longest summer day would indubitably point to an absolute parallel of latitude as determining the site of Vinland, if there was no doubt in the language of the saga. Unfortunately there is a wide divergence of opinion in the meaning of the words to be depended upon, even among Icelandic scholars; and the later writers among them assert that Rafn (Antiq. Amer. 436) and Magnusen in interpreting the language to confirm their theory of the Rhode Island bays have misconceived. Their argument is summarized in the French version of Wheaton. John M’Caul translated Finn Magnusen’s “Ancient Scandinavian divisions of the times of day,” in the Mémoire de la Soc. Roy. des Antiq. du Nord (1836-37). Rask disputes Rafn’s deductions (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 22). Torfæus, who is our best commentator after all, says it meant Newfoundland. Robertson put it at 58° north. Dahlmann in his Forschungen (vol. i.) places it on the coast of Labrador. Horsford (p. 66) at some length admits no question that it must have been between 41° and 43° north. Cf. Laing’s Heimskringla, i. 173; Palfrey’s New England, i. 55; De Costa’s Pre-Columbian Disc., p. 33; Weise’s Discoveries of America, 31; and particularly Vigfússon in his English-Icelandic Dictionary under “Eykt.”
[664] “The discovery of America,” says Laing (Heimskringla, i. 154), “rests entirely upon documentary evidence which cannot, as in the case of Greenland, be substantiated by anything to be discovered in America.” Laing and many of the commentators, by some strange process of reasoning, have determined that the proof of these MS. records being written before Columbus’ visit to Iceland in 1477 is sufficient to establish the priority of discovery for the Northmen, as if it was nothing in the case that the sagas may or may not be good history; and nothing that it was the opinion entertained in Europe at that time that Greenland and the more distant lands were not a new continent, but a prolongation of Europe by the north. It is curious, too, to observe that, treating of events after 1492, Laing is quite willing to believe in any saga being “filled up and new invented,” but is quite unwilling to believe anything of the kind as respects those written anterior to 1492; and yet he goes on to prove conclusively that the Flatoyensis Codex is full of fable, as when the saga man makes the eider-duck lay eggs where during the same weeks the grapes ripen and intoxicate when fresh, and the wheat forms in the ear! Laing nevertheless rests his case on the Flatoyensis Codex in its most general scope, and calls poets, but not antiquaries, those who attempt to make any additional evidence out of imaginary runes or the identification of places.
[665] It must be remembered that this divergence was not so wide to the Northmen as it seems to us. With them the Atlantic was sometimes held to be a great basin that was enclasped from northwestern Europe by a prolongation of Scandinavia into Greenland, Helluland, and Markland, and it was a question if the more distant region of Vinland did not belong rather to the corresponding prolongation of Africa on the south. Cf. De Costa, Pre-Columbian Disc., 108; Hist. Mag., xiii. 46.
[666] He wrote “Here for the first time will be found indicated the precise spot where the ancient Northmen held their intercourse.” The committee of the Mass. Hist. Soc. objected to this extreme confidence. Proceedings, ii. 97, 107, 500, 505.
[667] Reproduction of part of the plate in the Antiquitates Americanæ, after a drawing by J. R. Bartlett. The engravings of the rock are numerous: Mem. Amer. Acad., iii.; the works of Beamish, J. T. Smith, Gravier, Gay, Higginson, etc.; Laing’s Heimskringla; the French ed. of Wheaton; Hermes’ Entdeckung von America; Schoolcraft’s Ind. Tribes, i. 114, iv. 120; Drake’s ed., Philad., 1884, i. p. 88; the Copenhagen Compte Rendu, Congrès des Américanistes, p. 70, from a photograph. The Hitchcock Museum at Amherst, Mass., had a cast, and one was shown at the Albany meeting (1836) of the Am. Asso. for the Adv. of Science. The rock was conveyed by deed in 1861 to the Roy. Soc. of Northern Antiquaries (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., v. 226; vi. 252), but the society subsequently relinquished their title to a Boston committee, who charged itself with the care of the monument; but in doing so the Danish antiquaries disclaimed all belief in its runic character (Mag. Amer. Hist., iii. 236).
[668] De Costa, Pre-Col. Disc., 29; N. E. Hist. Geneal. Reg., xviii. 37; Gay, Pop. Hist., i. 41; Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., viii. 72; Am. Geog. Soc. Journal, 1870, p. 50; Amer. Naturalist, Aug. and Sept., 1879.
[669] Am. Ass. Adv. Science, Proc. (1856), ii. 214.
[670] Cf. paper on the site of Vinland in Hist. Mag., Feb., 1874, p. 94; Alex. Farnum’s Visit of the Northmen to Rhode Island (R. I. Hist. Tracts, no. 2, 1877). The statement of the sagas that there was no frost in Vinland and grass did not wither in winter compels some of the identifiers to resort to the precession of the equinox as accounting for changes of climate (Gay’s Pop. Hist., i. 50).
[671] E. G. Squier in Ethnological Journal, 1848; Wilson’s Prehist. Man, ii. 98; Amer. Ethnol. Soc. Trans., i. 392; Schoolcraft’s Indian Tribes, iv. 118; Mém. de la Soc. royale des Antiq. du Nord, 1840-44, p. 127.
[672] Amer. Philos. Soc. Proc., May 2, 1884 (by Henry Phillips, Jr.); Numismatic and Antiq. Soc. of Philad., Proc., 1884, p. 17; Geo. S. Brown’s Yarmouth (Boston, 1888).