NORTH AMERICAN
MYTHOLOGY
CHAPTER I
THE FAR NORTH
I. NORSEMAN AND SKRAELING
IN the year of our Lord 982 Eric the Red, outlawed from Iceland, discovered Greenland, which shortly afterward was colonized by Icelanders. Eric's son, Leif the Lucky, the first Christian of the New World, voyaging from Norway to Greenland, came upon a region to the south of Greenland where "self-sown corn" and wild vines grew, and which, accordingly, he named Vinland. This was in the year 1000, the year in which all Mediaeval Europe was looking for the Second Advent and for earth's destruction, but which brought instead the first discovery of a New World.
As yet no people had been encountered by the Scandinavians in the new-found lands. But the news of Vinland stirred the heart of Thorfinn Karlsefni and of his wife Gudrid, and with a company of men and two ships they set out for the region which Leif had found. First they came to a land which they called Helluland, "the land of flat stones," which seemed to them a place of little worth. Next they visited a wooded land full of wild beasts, and this they named Markland. Finally they came to Vinland, and there they dwelt for three winters, Gudrid giving birth to Snorri, the first white child born on the Western Continent. It was in Vinland that the Norsemen first encountered the Skraelings: "They saw a number of skin canoes, and staves were brandished from their boats with a noise like flails, and they were revolved in the same direction in which the sun moves." Thorfinn's band
