108 GREENLAND OR GREEN ISLAND
On the other hand, the belligerent spirit which kept up the
bloody feuds of Iceland would not quickly have lapsed from these
transplanted Icelanders in their new home. Moreover, there
were thralls among them and the irritations growing out of
thralldom. Also, while much of their daily routine was quiet
enough, they were subject to savage weather and perils of
navigation, of the fisheries, of hunting far up the coast, where
many of them maintained stations for that purpose at Krog-
fiordsheath and other points. Even in getting to Greenland Eric
was able to carry through only about half of the ships that sailed
with him, and Gudrid and Thorbiorn, coming later, incurred
ample experiences of storm and danger. These wild elements of
life would tend to enhance a certain recklessness; and the law
must have been impotent to maintain order in remote fiords
and headlands, even if it had sought to do so.
In the Floamanna Saga, dealing with events not long after the
very first settlement, the thralls of Thorgils murder his young
wife on the eastern coast, where they had all been cast ashore
together. In another of the Greenland tales there is a bloody
contention, freely involving homicide, over the claims of the
church upon the contents of two ships which had come to grief.
No doubt such instances might be multiplied; but in the main
we may believe that the lives of the Greenlanders went orderly
enough in common grooves of very primitive husbandry and
fishing. Adam may have judged by reports of visitors with a
grievance, narrated at second or third hand.
If Greenland had a long history, it was that of a few people in
a remote region and could not present many salient features.
The colony possessed at least one monastery and the beginning
of a literature, including, it is said, the Lay of Atli, revealing a
curious interest in the career of the great Hun Attila, on the part
of a distant colonist hidden in Arctic mists and writing beside
the glaciers. In art, as distinguished from literature, they seem
to have made few advances, if any, beyond mere ornamental
carving or designing on a plane hardly surpassing that of the
Eskimos.
