Whether the savages that the sagas describe were Indians or Eskimos is a question of some interest. John Fiske[10-2] believes that the explorers came in contact with American Indians; Vigfusson, on the other hand, believes that the sagas describe Eskimos. Here, however, the American has the better right to an opinion.
On this point, it is of importance to call attention to the fact that the Norse colonists in Greenland found no natives there, only vestiges of them. They were at that time farther north in Greenland; the colonists came in contact with them much later,--too late to admit of descriptions of them in any of the classical Icelandic sagas, in which the Greenland colonists play no inconspicuous part. Ari, the great authority on early Norse history, speaking of the Greenland colonists, says in his _Libellus Islandorum_:[11-1] "They found there men's habitations both east and west in the land [_i.e._, in both the Eastern and Western settlements] both broken cayaks and stone-smithery, whereby it may be seen that the same kind of folk had been there as they which inhabited Vinland, and whom the men of Greenland [_i.e._, the explorers] called Skrellings."
A sort of negative corroboration of this is offered by a work of high rank, the famous _Speculum Regale_, written in Old Norse in Norway in the middle of the thirteenth century. It contains much trustworthy information on Greenland; it tells, "with bald common sense," of such characteristic things as glaciers and northern lights, discusses the question as to whether Greenland is an island or a peninsula, tells of exports and imports, the climate, the means of subsistence, and especially the fauna, _but not one word concerning any natives_. Moreover Ivar Bardsen's account[11-2] of Greenland, which is entirely trustworthy, gives a distinct impression that the colonists did not come into conflict with the Eskimos until the fourteenth century.
There is consequently no valid reason for doubting that the savages described in the sagas were natives of Vinland and Markland. But whether it can ever be satisfactorily demonstrated that the Norse explorers came in contact with Algonquin, Micmac, or Beothuk Indians, and just where they landed, are not matters of essential importance. The incontrovertible facts of the various Norse expeditions are that Leif Ericson and Thorfinn Karlsefni are as surely historical characters as Christopher Columbus, that they visited, in the early part of the eleventh century, some part of North America where the grape grew, and that in that region the colonists found savages, whose hostility upset their plans of permanent settlement.