Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/172

Olafs; and priest Magnus Thorhallsson has written from thence, and also what is written before, and has illuminated the whole. God Almighty and the Holy Virgin Mary bless those who wrote, and him who dictated." The writer of this paragraph says, that the annals written out by the priest Magnus Thorhallsson from the beginning of the world come down to the present time, and he has consequently been a contemporary of the scribe Magnus Thorhallsson. These annals end with the year 1395, and the time at which the writing was concluded is thus distinctly ascertained. The time at which the writing was commenced is also distinctly ascertained; for in the piece on "how Norway was inhabited," in giving the series of kings, it is said, on coming to King Olaf Hakonson, "He was king when this book was writing; and then were elapsed from the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ 1300 and 80 and 7 years." The dates of the beginning and ending of this beautiful piece of penmanship are thus fixed, and the handwriting of each of the scribes perfectly known. The "Codex Flatoiensis" is not an original work of one author, but a collection of sagas transcribed from older manuscripts, and arranged in so far chronologically that the accounts are placed under the reign in which the events they tell of happened, although not connected with it or with each other. Under the saga of Olaf Tryggvesson are comprehended the sagas of the Feroe Islands; of the Vikings of Jomsburg; of Eric Fed, and Leif his son, the discoverers of Greenland and Vinland; and the voyages of Karlsefne to Vinland, and all the circumstances, true or false, of their adventures. It is evident that the main fact is that of a discovery of a western land being recorded in writing between 1387 and 1395; and whether the minor circumstances, such as the personal adventures of the discoverers, or the exact localities in America which they visited, be or