[Illustration: The mountains near Angmagsalik, east of Sermilik-fjord. Seen from the drift-ice in July 1888]
Thus, according to my view, the statements as to the glaciers on the east coast of Greenland are easily explained. It is a different matter when we come to the two names "Bláserkr" and "Hvítserkr," which, in later times especially, were those most frequently used. They have often been confused and interchanged, and while "Bláserkr" is found in the oldest authorities, the name "Hvítserkr" becomes more and more common in later writers. More recent authors have frequently regarded them as standing in a certain opposition to each other, one meaning a dark glacier or summit, and the other a white one, which may indeed seem natural. But it is striking that, while "Bláserkr" alone is mentioned in the oldest authorities, such as the Landnáma (and the Saga of Eric the Red, in the Hauksbók), it soon disappears almost entirely from literature, and is replaced by "Hvítserkr," which is first mentioned in MSS. of the fourteenth century and later; and in the fifteenth century MS. (A.M. 557, qv.) of the Saga of Eric the Red (as in other late extracts from the same saga) we find "Hvítserkr" instead of "Bláserkr."[264] I have not found the two names used contemporaneously in any Icelandic MS.; it is either one or the other, and nowhere are both names found as designating two separate places on the coast of Greenland. It may therefore be somewhat rash to assume, as has been done hitherto, that they were two "mountains," one of them lying a certain distance to the north on the east coast of Greenland, and the other near Cape Farewell. The view that they were mountains is not a new one. In Ivar Bárdsson's description Hvítserk is called "a high mountain" near Hvarf; while Björn Jónsson of Skardsá says that it is a "fuglabiarg i landnordurhafi" (i.e., a fowling cliff in the Polar Sea).
[Illustration: The inland ice at "Miðjǫkull." In the centre the mountain Kiatak, 64° 20' N. lat. Seen from the drift-ice in July 1888]
From the meaning of the names--the dark ("blá") sark and the white sark--we should be inclined to think that they were applied to snow-fields, or glaciers, like, for instance, such names as Snehætta and Lodalskåpa in Norway. But another possibility is that it was the _form_ of the sark that was thought of, and that the names were applied to mountain summits; in a similar way "stakk" (stack, or gown) is used for peaks in Norway (cf. Lövstakken near Bergen); and in Shetland corresponding names are known for high cliffs on the sea: Blostakk (== Blástakkr), Grostakk (== Grástakkr), Kwitastakk (== Hvíti stakkr), Gronastakk and Gronistakk (== Grœni stakkr, cliffs with grass-grown tops), etc. [cf. J. Jakobsen, 1901, p. 151].