THE ARNA-MAGNAEAN ACCOUNT 115 Book, 3 from Hauk Erlendsson, for whom and partly by whom it was prepared, necessarily before his death in 1334, but probably after he was given a certain title in 1305. Perhaps 1330 may mark the time of its completion. Along with divers other documents, it copies from some unknown original the saga of Eric the Red, sometimes called the saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni, an ancestor of the compiler, whose adventures as an early explorer of northeastern North America constitute a conspicuous feature of the narrative. Some parts of the saga of Eric the Red as thus transcribed, especially toward its ending, cannot be much older than the time of transcription, but verses embedded in other parts have been identified as necessarily of the eleventh century; and the body of the tale is, for the greater part, manifestly archaic. ANOTHER ACCOUNT, IN THE ARNA-MAGNAEAN MANUSCRIPT Beside Hauk's Book, there is a corroborative, independent, but almost identical manuscript copy of the saga No. 557 of the Arna-Magnaean collection at Copenhagen. This saga 4 tells us: Thence they sailed away beyond the Bear Islands with northerly winds. They were out two daegr (days); then they discovered land and rowed thither in boats and explored the country and found there many flat stones (hellur) so large that two men could well spurn soles upon them [lie at full length upon them, sole to sole]. There were many Arctic foxes there. They gave a name to the land and called it Helluland. Thence they sailed two daegr and bore away from the south toward the southeast and they found a wooded country and on it many animals; an island lay off the land toward the southeast; they killed a bear on this 8 Fully set forth in A. M. Reeves: The Finding of Wineland the Good, London, 1890; summarized in W. H. Babcock: Early Norse Visits to North America, Smith- sonian Misc. Colls., Vol. 59, No. 19, Washington, D. C., 1913, pp. 64 et seq. 4 Reeves, pp. 42 et seq. This work gives facsimiles of the pages in Hauk's Book dealing with the saga of Eric the Red, as well as the printed text in Icelandic, also a translation and notes distinguishing slight divergencies of Arna Magnaean MS. 557. I have followed the latter as slightly preferable and equally authentic and archaic in substance. William Hovgaard (The Voyages of the Norsemen to America, New York, 1914. P- 103) translates a little differently from Reeves in details but gives much the same purport.
