into English. There is one phase of the subject that this work does not
discuss: the identifications of the regions visited by the Northmen. Dr.
Storm, however, has gone into this subject, and is convinced that
Helluland, Markland, and Vinland of the sagas, are Labrador,
Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia.[10-1] The sailing directions in the "Saga
of Eric the Red" are given with surprising detail. These, with other
observations, seem to fit Nova Scotia remarkably well. Only one thing
appears to speak against Storm's view, and that is the _abundance_ of
grapes to which the Flat Island Book account testifies. But coupled with
this testimony are statements (to say nothing of the unreliability of
this saga in other respects) that indicate that the Icelandic narrators
had come to believe that grapes were gathered in the spring, thus
invalidating the testimony as to abundance.

Whether the savages that the sagas describe were Indians or Eskimos is a
question of some interest. John Fiske[10-2] believes that the explorers
came in contact with American Indians; Vigfusson, on the other hand,
believes that the sagas describe Eskimos. Here, however, the American has
the better right to an opinion.

On this point, it is of importance to call attention to the fact that the
Norse colonists in Greenland found no natives there, only vestiges of
them. They were at that time farther north in Greenland; the colonists
came in contact with them much later,--too late to admit of descriptions
of them in any of the classical Icelandic sagas, in which the Greenland
colonists play no inconspicuous part. Ari, the great authority on early
Norse history, speaking of the Greenland colonists, says in his
_Libellus Islandorum_:[11-1] "They found there men's habitations both
east and west in the land [_i.e._, in both the Eastern and Western
settlements] both broken cayaks and stone-smithery, whereby it may be