The colonies of Greenland, after being occupied, according to Norwegian and Danish tradition, from the tenth to the fifteenth century, were entirely forgotten. The colonists are believed to have been exterminated by the native Eskimo. The very locality chosen for their settlements was so completely lost sight of that, when an interest in their history revived, and expeditions were sent out to revisit the scene of early Norse colonisation beyond the Atlantic, much time was lost in a fruitless search on the coast lying directly west from Iceland. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, an oar drifted to the Iceland coast, a relic, as was believed, of the long-lost colony of Greenland, bearing this inscription in runic characters: OFT VAR EK DASA DUR EK DRO THICK—_Oft was I weary when I drew thee_; but it was not till the close of the century that the traditions of the old Greenlanders began to excite attention. Many a Norse legend pictured the enviable delights of the fabled Hesperian region discovered within the Arctic circle, yet meriting by the luxuriance of its fertile valleys its name of Greenland; and the fancies and legendary traditions that gradually displaced the history of the old colony, had been interwoven by the poet Montgomery with the tale of self-sacrificing labours of Moravian Missionaries, in the cantos of his _Greenland_ epic, long before the _Antiquitates Americanæ_ issued from the Copenhagen press.
The narrations of ancient voyagers, and their explorations in the New World, as brought to light in 1835 by the Copenhagen volume on pre-Columbian America, were too truthful in their aspect to be slighted; and too fascinating in their revelations of a long-forgotten intercourse between the Old World and the New, to be willingly subjected to incredulous analysis. From the genuine literary memorials of older centuries, sufficient evidence could be gleaned to place beyond question, not only the discovery and colonisation of Greenland by Eric the Red,—apparently in the year 985,—but also the exploration of southern lands, some of which must have formed part of the American continent. The manuscripts whence those narratives are derived are of various dates, and differ widely in value; but of the genuineness and historical significance of the oldest of them, no doubt can be entertained. The accounts which some of them furnish are so simple, and devoid of anything extravagant or improbable, that the internal evidence of truthfulness is worthy of great consideration. The exuberant fancy of the Northmen, which revels in their mythology and songs, would have constructed a very different tale had it been employed in the invention of a southern continent, or earthly Paradise fashioned from the dreams of Icelandic and Greenland rovers.