try in all districts and communities. He also sent to SAGA VI. Iceland Gissur White and Hialte Skeggiason, to pro¬ claim Christianity there; and sent with them a priest called Thormod, along with several men in holy orders. But he retained with him, as hostages, four Icelanders whom he thought the most important; namely, Kiartan Olafsson, Haldor Gudmundsson, Kolbein Thordsson, and Swerting Bunalfsson. Of Gissur and Hialte's progress, it is related that they came to Iceland before the All-thing, and went to the Thing; and in that Thing Christianity was introduced by law into Iceland, and in the course of the summer all the people were baptized.
Chapter CIV.
Greenland baptized.
The same spring King Olaf also sent Leif Ericsson Chapter to Greenland to proclaim Christianity there, and Leif went there that summer. In the ocean he took up the crew of a ship which had been lost, and who were clinging to the wreck. He also found Vinland the Good; arrived about harvest in Greenland; and had with him for it a priest and other teachers, with whom he went to Brattalid to lodge with his father Eric. People called him afterwards Leif the Lucky: but his father Eric said that his luck and ill luck balanced each other; for if Leif had saved a wreck in the ocean, he had brought a hurtful person with him to Greenland, and that was the priest.[1]
- ↑ There are eight chapters here in Peringskiold's edition of the Heiraskringla which relate to the discovery of Vinland, and are taken from the Codex Flatoyensis, but are not in the manuscripts of the Heimskringla known to the Danish antiquaries. They are supposed to have been an interpolation in the manuscript which Peringskiold had before him, but which is not now to be found. That they are an interpolation is manifest, because they have no reference to or connection with the events or personages before them or after them in Snorro's narrative, and interrupt Olaf Tryggvesson's history at the most interesting and important period; but all Snorro's incidents and personages in his episodes reappear and conduce to his story, as in real life, or as in Homer's practice or Horace's precepts of the construction of an epic. This artistical management of his tale is one of the beauties of Snorro's
