SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

190 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
appears to contain no more than the inferences and
inventions of a learned man.
Carl V. Solver brought the map of Sigur6ur Stefansson
(died 1595), rector of the school at Skalholt, into the
discussion concerning the geography of the lands west of
the Atlantic. 7 He reckoned that the Icelanders' old
knowledge of the relative location of the lands was
revealed in it. The original map is lost, but a seventeenthcentury
copy dates the original to 1570. SOlver rightly
suggests that this should be 1590. It appears certain that
Sigur6ur knew some sixteenth-century map of the western
hemisphere, probably that by Ortelius (1570), but his
arrangement of the topography of America doubtless
depends on his knowledge of the Vinland sagas. A
peninsula is shown on the map running due north from the
land west of the Atlantic, on the same latitude as England,
and this is named Promontorium Winlandire, This
peninsula could have been inserted in accordance with the
description in the Grcenlendinga saga of the ness "which ran
north from the land" (i.e. Vinland), and the name invented
by Sigur6ur Stefansson. It is hard to see what
independent value the map can have. On the other hand,
it does preserve the intelligent inference of an educated
man of the sixteenth century as far as the location of
Vinland is concerned. His inference is just as valid today.
If the Vinland of the Gramlendinga saga is indeed
Newfoundland, then many people will argue that it is
necessary to alter that country's climate to bring the
descriptions into line with the facts. Research into the
soil and the results of pollen analysis may perhaps prove
one day that the climate there was milder c. A.D. 1000 than
it is now. But it is not even certain that we need to
reckon with any great changes in the climate as far as the
question of name-giving is concerned. It is much more
important, as Professor Jones remarks on p. 86, that "In
land-naming as in other ways Leif was his father's
, Vesteruejen (1954), 56 ff., 92 ff.