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related to words meaning ‘wrinkle’ or ‘shrink’, possibly referring to the treatment of animal skins; it is translated in this edition as ‘natives’). The same word is used of the natives of Greenland, who must have been a quite different people.
    The Saga of the Greenlanders
and
Eirik the Red’s Saga
blend to an equal extent the navigational and geographical accuracy for which they are famous with stories of magic and the supernatural. Both employ all of the standard authenticating techniques of the
Íslendinga sögur
, together with other features of saga style. Both are associated with King Olaf Tryggvason and the conversion of Greenland to Christianity. Leif Eiriksson, in fact, had reluctantly accepted from the king the difficult duty of converting Greenland when he took the voyage that resulted in his lucky discovery of
Vinland
. His father Eirik was a hard-bitten old Viking, who was banished from Iceland and who resented Christianity. He had several children, the most memorable of whom – aside from Leif – was an illegitimate daughter named Freydis. She is the epitome of evil in
The Saga of the Greenlanders
, being responsible for killing a number of her fellow explorers and for personally taking an axe to five women whom her men had refused to kill. Somewhat more benignly but no less mythically, in
Eirik the Red’s Saga
she frightens off an attacking band of natives by running after them, even though she is pregnant, and then, when surrounded by them, picking up a sword from a dead Greenlander, pulling one of her breasts out of her clothing and slapping it with the naked sword. The natives were terrified at the sight and ran to their boats and rowed away. Almost as good a woman as Freydis was evil, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir was the wife of Thorfinn Karlsefni and the mother of Snorri, the first person of European ancestry to be born in America. She has been described as the true central character of these sagas. After a pilgrimage to Rome, she lived out her life as an anchoress in Iceland, and from her were descended several of the early bishops of Iceland. What precisely these extreme examples of good and evil in the Vinland sagas, as well as other instances of magic and the paranormal, might have to do with the coming of Christianity to the north, the saga composer (as usual) does not tell us.

V. A FICTION OF SOCIAL REALISM
     
    How the traditional poetry and the sagas came to be written down in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century is something of a mystery. We do not have an account of the circumstances and method, such as Ari gives for the writing of the laws. We do not know, for example, what division of labour might have existed between the people who gave a final shape to the texts and the scribes who wrote them down on vellum, made of calf-skin. None of the
Íslendinga sögur
has been preserved in an original draft or a saga author’s holograph. Most of the surviving texts were written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from originals or copies of them now lost, which were not necessarily a great deal older. Some are even later paper manuscripts, again based on lost vellum originals. Quite a few have come down to us in more than one distinct version, providing their editors with considerable worry and leading to learned debate. The single largest and most valuable collection of
Íslendinga sögur
is a mid-fourteenth-century manuscript known as
Modruvallabdk
, which consists of 200 vellum leaves and contains eleven sagas.
    However the earliest manuscripts came about, it is apparent that some of them contain material that had existed in oral tradition for a long time. The
Poetic Edda
and the
fornaldarsögur
(some of which also contain eddic poems), include legendary characters and motifs based on historical figures from the fifth century. They appear in the oldest survivals of English and continental epic. Although it is scarcely possible to reconstruct much about ancient religious