SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

180 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
between farm animals and game; sheep and reindeer were
equally welcome to them. Sheep-stealing was perhaps
the worst crime which it was possible to commit in Iceland.
It needs no great effort of the imagination to see that little
friendship is likely to have existed between the Greenland
farmers and the Skrrelings who, with their very limited
understanding of the nature of property rights, must have
gone for the sheep-flocks when their hunting failed - and
at other times as well. Thus it is wrong to say (p. 65)
that "there was no compelling reason for head-on clashes
between the south-moving Eskimo and the stationary
Norsemen" Greenland stories tell of strife between the
two groups of people in the country, and Professor Jones
appends a translation of the tale of Ungortok, the last of
the Greenlanders, to his book.
There were other dangers too. Niels Egede, the son of
Hans Egede, the evangelist of Greenland, tells a story
which he had from an angagok (medicine man) from
Unartoq (Siglufjor