Historical Lectures and Essays | Page 2

had been brought up on the old man's
knee, and hurrying off to find him met Tyrker coming back twisting his
eyes about--a trick of his--smacking his lips and talking German to
himself in high excitement. And when they get him to talk Norse again,
he says: "I have not been far, but I have news for you. I have found
vines and grapes!" "Is that true, foster-father?" says Leif. "True it is,"
says the old German, "for I was brought up where there was never any
lack of them."
The saga--as given by Rafn--had a detailed description of this quaint
personage's appearance; and it would not he amiss if American
wine-growers should employ an American sculptor--and there are great
American sculptors--to render that description into marble, and set up
little Tyrker in some public place, as the Silenus of the New World.
Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been
of timber and of raisins, and of vine-stocks, which were not like to
thrive.
And more. Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another land,
Whiteman's Land--or Ireland the Mickle, as some called it. For these
Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and Ketla of
Ruykjanes, supposed to have been long since drowned at sea, and said
that the people had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptized Ari. What
is all this? and what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in
Markland told the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk
wore white clothes, and carried flags on poles? Are these all dreams? or
was some part of that great civilisation, the relics whereof your
antiquarians find in so many parts of the United States, still in existence
some 900 years ago; and were these old Norse cousins of ours upon the

very edge of it? Be that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings,
some of whom seemed to have sailed far south along the shore, become
aware that just beyond them lay a land of fruits and spices, gold and
gems? The adverse current of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have
long prevented their getting past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico;
but, sooner or later, some storm must have carried a Greenland viking
to San Domingo or to Cuba; and then, as has been well said, some
Scandinavian dynasty might have sat upon the throne of Mexico.
These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found,
almost all of them, in Professor Rafn's "Antiquitates Americanae." The
action in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the internal
evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, who, when he saw
what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton at the south-east
end of Boston Bay, said, "Here should I like to dwell," and, shot by an
Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, with a cross at his head
and a cross at his feet, and call the place Cross Ness for evermore;
Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange
deeds from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland and back,
and at last, worn out and sad, goes off on a pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi
and Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after
times, devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour
during the long winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the terrible
Freydisa, who, when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the
Esquimaux and flee from them, as they had three weeks before fled
from Thorfinn's bellowing bull, turns, when so weak that she cannot
escape, single-handed on the savages, and catching up a slain man's
sword, puts them all to flight with her fierce visage and fierce
cries--Freydisa the Terrible, who, in another voyage, persuades her
husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when asleep, and murder them
and all their men; and then, when he will not murder the five women
too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself, and getting back to
Greenland, when the dark and unexplained tale comes out, lives
unpunished, but abhorred henceforth. All these folks, I say, are no
phantoms, but realities; at least, if I can judge of internal evidence.
But beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and Fairyland,
there is a ballad called "Finn the Fair," and how
An upland Earl had twa braw sons, My story to begin; The tane was

Light Haldane the strong, The tither was winsome Finn.
and so forth; which was still sung, with other "rimur," or ballads, in the
Faroes, at the end of the last century. Professor Rafn has inserted it,
because it talks of Vinland