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erected their tent, they saw a merchant vessel driven by the same wind as they had been, and which came to land in the same place. Delighted with this happy event, Thorgils sent Thorleif and Kol to learn the name of the new-comers and to ask them for news. On their arrival at the ship a man in a red coat, who was seated upon the poop, arose and welcomed Thorleif in a very friendly manner. It was the latter's stepfather, Thorstein the Fair; he asked after Thorgils, and learning that he was in the vicinity, he went to him. It was a happy meeting. The newcomer told that he had come from Iceland, and that the affairs of Thorgils were in good shape, but that for four years no one had heard him speak of him; that his daughter Thorny had married Bjarne of Græf. Perceiving that Thorleif did not return to Norway, Thorstein had manned his ship and set sail for Iceland; he had passed two winters there without obtaining news of the emigrants, and he had set out on a search for them. Rejoiced to have found them, he placed all he had at their disposal. Thorgils said, he expected to take nothing from his friend. Soon the people of the country approached them. A land-owner called Thoir, who lived near-by, offered hospitality to Thorstein which he accepted. regards Thorgils, at the invitation of Eric the Red, he went to Brattahlid with twelve men. He was placed over against the master of the house;

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after him came Thorleif, then Kol, and lastly Starkad. A nurse was obtained for Thorfinn, but he would not drink milk until it was made dark.'

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The emigrants have reached happy haven. We need not follow them further, since the account of their shipwreck is the single object of this memoir, and it ends here. It occupies but the fourth or the fifth part of the saga according to the texts, and it forms the longest and by far the most important episode thereof. It is not merely the sojourn of the emigrants upon the east coast of Greenland, their painful journey across the icebergs or along the foot of the glaciers, which has made of it a document valuable by reason of its antiquity; it is also a source of careful instruction which would be hard to find elsewhere, regarding the preparations of the emigrants, their precautions in embarking with a large number of travellers, with cattle, with building materials, with provisions, with utensils, in short with everything which might be of use to them in their prospective establishment. These details throw a clear light upon the beginnings of the Greenland colony, and enable us to comprehend how it could succeed amid arduous surroundings, and in a country so little favored by nature. It is likely that the other emigrants

1 Floamanna saga, in Groenlands Hist. Mindes. II. pp. 122-127; in Fornsægur, pp. 147-8.

had no less practical good sense, foresight and energy than Thorgils. With these qualities, which have not always distinguished their imitators in modern times, they were able to transplant the Scandinavian civilization to one of the most sterile countries of the New World, to create there for themselves a new fatherland, to procure for themselves there abundant means of subsistence; to perpetuate themselves there during five centuries, and that without the aid of the Eskimo, then very scarce on the west shore of Davis Strait, and doing this without possessing the resources and advantages of traffic with the natives, but living entirely by fishing, by hunting, and the raising of cattle, and by finding in the export of natural products the means for buying and importing into Greenland all sorts of European commodities and merchandise. In no other part of America so far north was there founded a European colony which was able to subsist by itself, independently of the natives and the mother country. Even the Danish settlements in Greenland were placed on different foundations; they maintained themselves by means of monopoly, and simply exchanged European products for the raw material which the Eskimo drew from the bosom of the sea.

The Icelandic colony of Greenland therefore presents a phenomenon unique in history; this is what constitutes the value of the documents

which bear on it, and notably of the Floamanna saga. This saga has been very variously estimated; Finnus Johannæus places it among the number of the ancient sagas relating to Iceland which it is useful to consult, and which furnishes many good ideas.' Borge Thorlacius looks upon it as worthy of belief; according to him it deserves attention, not only on account of the adventures of its hero, but also by reason of its vividness of narration, its extrinsic worth, its displays of character; above all for the light which it sheds upon many points of northern antiquity." P. E. Muller confesses that some of the adventures of Thorgils appear to him suspicious, but "that which relates to Eric the Red agrees well with the saga on that personage. Several phases of the sojourn of Thorgils in Greenland are so naive and characteristic, that they bear the impress of truth. One should not be surprised that the shipwrecked party-castaway upon a desert coast of Greenland in the eleventh century, and dwelling there amid miseries during several winters-should have believed that they saw ghosts of the departed, or heard mysterious warnings. On the other hand, however, if the supernatural is presented in this saga with a seriousness which shows that the narrator himself believed in it, and

1 Historia ecclesiastica Islandae, IV preface, Copenhagen, 1778, 4to.

2 En nordisk Heit; in Skandin. Lit. Selskab Skrifler, pp. 194,[202, 206.

Munch, states that the principal events recorded in this saga have entirely the impress of truth, although some of the accessory circumstances have an air of having been later exaggerated and embellished,' and he has not hesitated to give a place to Thorgils in his conscientious history of the Norwegian people. The Danish historian, N. M. Petersen, has simply re-produced the opinions of his predecessors; he admits that the saga has been embellished, and that the important account of the sojourn of Thorgils on the east coast of Greenland has been impaired by the fabulous features. The Norwegian, R. Keyser, is more severe than these critics, he grants very little historic value to the Floamanna saga, "in view," he says, "of the fact that the true events which form the foundation of the recital are evidently mixed up to a considerable extent with fabulous additions, which, most of the time, do not even possess the merit of rendering the narrative more interesting."

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distinguishing it from similar ad- The Norwegian historian, P. A. ventures in fairy tales,-it is frequent, and moreover affects more deservedly the occurrences than is ordinarily the case in purely historic sagas. The numerous temptations presented by Thor seem to belong to a later period; at least no ancient saga mentions anything like these."" "The voyage of Thorgils to Greenland," says Finn Magnusen, "must ever remain a memorable one. The account which has been given of it carries indubitably the impress of truth, although, after an exhaustive examination, criticism may be able to discover in it here and there an error proceeding from the misunderstandings of the narrators or copyists. The events are presented conformably with the prejudices and the superstitions of the Middle Ages. Although a portion of these recitals may possess little attraction for cultivated readers, because they are corrupted by the irregular imagination and the false conception of unenlightened persons, they nevertheless reflect the real character, the point of view, and the opinions of our ancestors. The most important among them possess an incontestable credibility, which affords us an exact picture of the situation, the extent, and the wild and uncultivated condition of the eastern coast of Greenland.""

1 Sagabibliothek, I., pp. 313, 314, Copenhagen, 1817, 18mo.

2 Groenlands hist. Mindes. II. pp. 6-7.

3 Det norske Folks Historie, part 1st, Vol. II, p. 137, note, (Christiania, 1853, 8vo.)

4 Ibid. pp. 41-43; 136, 137; 184; 360; 363; 465; 862-863.

5 Bidrag til den old nordiske Literaturs Historie, p. 208, in Annaler for nordisk OldKyndighed og Historie, 1861, Copenhagen, 1866, 8vo.

6 Normændenes Videnskabelighed og Literatur i Middelalderen, p. 493, forming the 1st vol. of his Efterladte Skrifter, Christiania, 1866, 8vo.

It seems to us that the learned historian has allowed himself to be too powerfully influenced by the credulity of the narrator, proving doubtless his lack of the critical quality, but affording at the same time a proof of his good faith; for it is but the outcome of the belief of his day; and were this absent from a work of this kind and of that age, we might suspect that it had been touched up or expurgated in more modern centuries. If the marvellous which occupies so prominent a role in this saga did not have a place in nature, it did have a chief one in the diseased brains of the shipwrecked, which their sufferings and privations filled with hallucinations; they ascribed to the vengeance of Thor the misfortunes which overwhelmed them, or if they did not do so themselves, the superstitious narrator may well have sought in the contempt exhibited toward that false god the expla

nation of unmerited disasters. The pious sentiments which possessed him were not inconsistent with an

ascription of a certain amount of power to a mythological being, who to him as to mediæval christians generally, was the devil in the northern conceptions of him. The fantastic portions of the saga, therefore, do not in the least impair the authority of the narrator; they furnish on the contrary, an element of local color, and, as it is always easy to eliminate them, their presence in the recital has not the disadvantage that errors of a more likely nature would produce. Leaving the supernatural out of the account, there remains an animated picture of interesting adventures, but not at all extraordinary; an exact delineation of a country but little known even in our day. And the conformity of this description with that which has been given by modern travellers is a sure warrant for the authenticity of the account, which, if it has not been composed. by one of the shipwrecked party, could not have been composed at all except from their own recitals.

E. BEAUVOIS.

THE HISTORIAN MOTLEY AT WORK.*

IN a treatment of Motley in a magazine devoted to National history, we must be careful not to pass beyond our scope. We must confine ourselves strictly to the man, apart from his subject to the American writing a noble history, without regarding the country which he has so splendidly illustrated. Yet remembering the interests of historical students, to which these pages generally, and especially these essays on books are devoted, it will be quite legitimate to look in upon him at his work, both in the manner of it and in the place of it; so that if our curiosity in its laudable pursuit of him with reference to the circumstance of locality, leads us after all to the country whose history he has written, we may still feel we are properly there, and are not violating our National conditions.

A most interesting question may be raised at the very outset-none the less so because it must remain without positive answer, and may be left

* John Lothrop Motley-A Memoir, by Oliver Wendell Holmes (Houghton, Osgood & Co., Boston, 1879.)

Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley. Edited by George W. Curtis, in two volumes. (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1889).

within the field of conjecture or mystery. It is this: why did Motley ever come to write on just that subject the treatment of which has lent an undying lustre to his name and to the literary fame of his native land? The settlement of that question were a not unimportant gain to literary history-particularly in the domain of American literature. Dr. Holmes in his "Memoir" left the question unanswered; but he disclaimed for his book the exhaustiveness of a biography, and hoped this would be written by some other hand. Ten years after appeared the "Correspondence," and we hopefully turned for the solution of this question to these volumes. But almost the first word of the editor is a reference for biographical details to Dr. Holmes' "Memoir." Finally in despair the writer addressed the inquiry to Dr. Holmes himself, to which he was kind enough to make a reply, but assuring us that he was unable to make a positive statement in regard to the

matter.

We are left then to conjecture, and there are steps in such a process which almost lead us into the light of certainty-yet certainty we are to re

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