reason I have chosen the later version of the Eric Saga. Professor York Powell also points out that in the Thorkill voyage there are traces of a lost Swipdag story, which might be called the Icelandic Odyssey; it also contains traces, according to him, of the myth of Loki, while the plucking of the hair is a well-known Folktale incident, and the trick of the log in bed is familiar to us from our earliest days in "Jack the Giant-Killer." I would add that the incident in which the sailors seize the sacred animals is so close to the similar one in the Odyssey that we can scarcely avoid tracing it to some reminiscence of the Greek epic, which we know reached Ireland in an oral form as early as the tenth or eleventh century.
Remarks.—This trace of the influence of the Odyssey is, however, of little importance, as the whole scheme of Thorkill's voyage bears trace of its autochthonous character. As Professor York Powell remarks: "The dark, fuelless, starless, grassless land is evidently based upon some reminiscence of the Arctic islands." It is scarcely to be doubted, that Dr. Nansen was to some extent anticipated by Norse voyagers, and that Thor kill's story shows reminiscences of the Sutherland preacher who harrowed the souls of his congregation by his descriptions of hell, as being filled with ice and of an average temperature minus 100 degrees. To a Southron friend, who pointed out the hetorodoxy of this description, he replied: "Whist! mon, if they thought it hot, they'd all want to go there." The preacher was more orthodox than he knew, for in the doctrines of the Church there are cold cells in the Inferno, as we know from Dante and from Shakespeare. Or perhaps he was influenced by the Icelandic tradition of the other world, of which a faint echo is to be found in the story of Thorkill. The late Dr. Rydberg was as ingenious as usual in his treatment of this myth. (See his Teutonic Mythology, pp. 208-304, where he deals with both our voyages.) He points out the influence of Christian, or rather of Jewish mythology in the voyage of
