Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/157

Drontheim, have raised his compassion by their complaint that after having been Christians for 600 years, and converted by the holy Saint Olaf, and having erected many sacred buildings and a splendid cathedral on said island, in which divine service was diligently performed, they had thirty years ago been attacked by the heathens of the neighbouring coast, who came with a fleet against them, and killed and dispersed many, and made slaves of those who were able-bodied; but having now gathered together again, they crave the services of priests and a bishop." The pope therefore desires those bishops, as the nearest, to consult with their diocesan, if the distance permit, and to send the Greenland people a suitable man to be their bishop. The sudden extinction of a colony, which must have attained considerable importance and population to have had a regular succession of bishops for 250 years, is much more extraordinary than its establishment. It vanished, as it were, from the face of the earth, about the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century; and even the memory of its former existence passed away. The Christian colony established in the 10th century in Greenland, with its churches, monasteries, bishops, was considered, notwithstanding the internal and the collateral evidence supporting the sagas, to be a pious delusion of the middle ages, founded on a mere saga fable. The fable itself is short, and appears to have nothing fabulous in it. In the beginning of the 10th century, an Icelander or a Norwegian, called Gunbiorn, son of Ulf Kraka, was driven by a storm to the west of Iceland, and discovered some rocks, which he called Gunbiorn Skerry, and a great country, of which he brought the news to Iceland. Soon after one Eric Red, or Eric the Red, was condemned at Thornæs Thing, in Iceland, to banishment for a murder he had committed. He fitted out a vessel, and told his friends he would go