[Illustration: Felling trees. Marginal decoration of the Jónsbók (fifteenth century)]
The oldest and most original part of Eric's Saga, as of most other sagas, is probably the lays. Of special interest are the lays attributed to Thorhall the Hunter; they give an impression of genuineness and do not harmonise well with the prose text, which was evidently composed much later. One of the lays, which describes the poet's disappointment at not getting wine to drink in the new country instead of water, shows that a notion was current that wine was abundant there, and this notion must have come from the myth of the Fortunate Land or Wineland; for, if we confine ourselves to this one saga, the notion cannot have been derived from the single earlier voyage thither that is there mentioned--namely, Leif's: during his short visit he cannot possibly have had time to make wine, even if he had known how to do so. The lay seems therefore to show that men had really reached a country which was taken to be the "Wineland," or Fortunate Isles, of legend, but which turned out not to answer to the ideas which had been formed of it. The second lay attributed to Thorhall (see vol. i. p. 326) may also point to the country they had arrived at not being so excessively rich, for they had to cook whales' flesh on Furðustrandir (and consequently were obliged to support themselves by whaling). This gives us an altogether more sober picture than the prose version of the saga; the latter, moreover, says nothing of whales except the one that made them ill and was thrown out.
The surest historical evidence that voyages were made to America from Greenland is the chance statement, referred to later, in the Icelandic Annals: that in 1347 a ship from Greenland bound for Markland was driven by storms to Iceland. This reveals the fact that, occasionally at any rate, this voyage was made; and if the sagas about the Wineland voyages must be regarded as romances, or as a kind of legendary poetry--which therefore made no attempt whatever to give a historical exposition of the communication with the countries to the south-west--then many more voyages may have been made thither than the sagas had use for. A prominent feature of the different tales is that of the Greenlanders bringing timber from thence; this appears already in the story of Leif's discovery of the country--he found various kinds of trees and "mǫsurr," and brought them home with him--and still more in the tales of the Flateyjarbók, where on each voyage it is expressly stated that they felled timber to load their ships, as though that were their chief object. In the Icelandic geography mentioned on p. 1, there is an addition, probably of late date: