At the time that the alleged voyages to this continent in the year 1000, and a few years subsequent, were made, the old Danish or Icelandic tongue, then spoken in Iceland and Greenland, the vernacular of the explorers, had not been reduced to a written language, and of course the narrative of these voyages could not at that time be written out. But there was in that language an oral literature of a peculiar and interesting character. It had its poetry, its romance, its personal memoirs, and its history. It was nevertheless unwritten. It was carried in the memory, and handed down from one generation to another. In distinguished and opulent families men were employed to memorize and rehearse on festivals and other great occasions, as a part of the entertainment, the narratives, which had been skilfully put together and polished for public recital, relating to the exploits and achievements of their ancestors. These narratives were called sagas, and those who memorized and repeated them were called sagamen. It was a hundred and fifty years after the alleged discovery of this continent before the practice began of committing Icelandic sagas to writing. Suitable parchment was difficult to obtain, and the process was slow and expensive, and only a few documents of any kind at first were put into written form. But in the thirteenth century written sagas multiplied to vast numbers. They were deposited in convents and in other places of safety. Between 1650 and 1715, these old Icelandic parchments were transferred to the libraries of Stockholm and Copenhagen. They were subsequently carefully read, and classified by the most competent and erudite scholars. Among them two sagas were found relating to discoveries far to the southwest of Greenland, the outlines of which I have given you in the preceding pages. The earliest of these two sagas is supposed to have been written by Hauk Erlendsson, who died in 1334. Whether he copied it from a previous manuscript, or took the narrative from oral tradition, cannot be determined. The other was written out in its present form somewhere between 1387 and 1395. It was probably copied from a previous saga not known to be now in existence, but which is conjectured to have been originally written out in the twelfth century. These documents are pronounced by scholars qualified to judge of the character of ancient writings to be authentic, and were undoubtedly believed by the writers to be narratives of historical truth.