SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

174
Saga-Book oj the Viking Society
Greenland voyages and settlement, both Icelandic and
foreign ones, as well as archaeology, place-names and so
forth, and the author makes mention of these in the
history section. But, at present at any rate, our
knowledge of the voyages to Vinland depends solely upon
written sources.
I am not competent to judge how Professor Jones's
translations will sound to an Englishman, but on the whole
they are accurate and reliable. There is one misunderstanding
worthy of mention. In Eiriks saga we read "Rak
pa skip peirra um haf innan" The translation on p. 174
runs: "Then their ship was driven away out and about
the ocean." Haj innan means as little to the modern
Icelander as "the inner ocean" does to an Englishman,
but the author of the Eiriks saga was a scholar and he had
a good grasp of the cosmography of his time. Educated
Icelanders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
reckoned that a circle of lands lay around the North
Atlantic: they comprised Norway, Finmark, the wastelands
stretching from Bj armaland to Greenland, Helluland,
Markland, and Vinland, "which some men reckon extends
from Africa" Ideas about this ring of land may be
traced to the twelfth century in Scandinavia and it is this
concept which should be brought out in the translation of
"urn haf innan" As will be shown below, this idea is of
no small significance for our assessment of the value of
the Eirlks saga as a geographical source. There are other
instances of slight inaccuracy that may 1)(' counted
regrettable, not least when every detail is made the object
of such intensive discussion. It says in the saga: "Patlan
(i.e. from Helluland) sigldu reir tvau dcegr og brei til
landsuors lir suori og jundu land" This is translated:
"Then they sailed with a north wind for two days, when
land lay ahead of them" (p. 179). But the italicised
phrase in the Icelandic must mean that they changed
course from due south to southeast from Helluland, and
this is far from adequately indicated by saying that "they