SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Observations on the Discoveries of the Norsemen 189
came to a river, which fell down from the land into a lake,
and thence into the sea." And it is only at this point in
the second year of the expedition that the author sees fit
to allow that they have reached Vinland.
To some extent the author of the Eiriks saga seems to
have thought of his work as a text-book in the geography
of the lands to the north and west of the Atlantic. He
locates the lands to the west not only by describing their
relative positions from north to south and the course
followed from Greenland to Vinland but also by
attempting to bring them within the frame of the general
world-picture of the west European geographers of his
time. He must have known that Ireland lies farther west
in the ocean than Norway, and he must have concluded
that the distance between Markland and Ireland was
therefore much shorter than that between Greenland and
Norway. He describes the voyage from Bjarneyjar as
24 hours south to Helluland and then 24 hours southeast
to Markland. In the Landndmabok, a thirteenth-century
work known to the author of the Eiriks saga, it says that
Hvitramannaland is located westward in the ocean near
Vinland the good, and that it is reckoned to take 6 daigr
(72 hours) to sail there from Ireland. On the other hand,
the same source gives 7 dagr (84 hours) as the sailing time
between Norway and Iceland. The author of the
Eiriks saga says that Hvitramannaland lies opposite
Markland, but it is obvious that the relative position of
these countries was, naturally enough, obscure to him and
his contemporaries in general.
All in all, it seems that the author of the Eiriks saga had
a clear idea of the courses to be sailed, but that on his map
the distances between lines of longitude did not increase
at all as one followed them southward. Because of this
he concludes that it was not much of a step from Ireland
westward over the Atlantic, and he illustrates this
conclusion in three exempla. In these matters and as far
as the geography of Vinland is concerned, the Eiriks saga
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