Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/201

vikingkappe, a scald, who was much respected, and who had fallen in love with Thuride, on which account her husband and her brother had persecuted him, and he had left Iceland in a vessel about the year 998, and had never afterwards been heard of: "and this is the only truth known concerning Biorn." This saga is supposed to have been written or composed in the beginning of the 13th century; as it mentions one Gudney telling him the saga-writer, of taking up and interring in a church the bones of some of Snorro the Godar's predecessors, and this Gudney is known to have died about 1220. The legend has a value independent of the truth or falsity of the details. These are at least improbable. The man could have no object in concealing his name, which the tokens he was sending to Iceland would at once reveal, and no intelligible motive for not returning with his countrymen. But it is valuable, because, whatever may be the truth of the filling up, or even of the main event of a vessel being driven to an unknown land, it shows an existing rumour or idea among seafaring men, long before Columbus's discoveries, that a north-east wind would bring a vessel sailing from Iceland to Ireland to a new land on the south-west, if she ran before it; and not into an uninhabitable region of fire, as the Romans appear to have conceived of the world. Some obscure knowledge of a western land must have been circulating as a foundation for this legend. The White Man's Land, the Great Ireland, a country in the west peopled by Christians originally of Ireland, has the same kind of value of showing that men, either from the reason in the supposition, which is the most likely, or from some actual chance discovery, had come to the conclusion that there was land in the west opposite the shores of Europe; and it also has the same kind of worthlessness as the other two legends—that the details are evidently fictitious and improbable.