With the celebrated Ari Thorgilsson, usually known as Frodhi, "the learned," we come to testimony nearly contemporaneous in time and extremely valuable in character. This erudite priest, born in 1067, was the founder of historical writing in Iceland. He was the principal author of the "Landnama-bok," already mentioned as a work of thorough and painstaking research unequalled in mediaeval literature. His other principal works were the "Konunga-bok," or chronicle of the kings of Norway, and the "Islendinga-bok," or description of Iceland.[247] Ari's books, written not in monkish Latin, but in a good vigorous vernacular, were a mine of information from which all subsequent Icelandic historians were accustomed to draw such treasures as they needed. To his diligence and acumen they were all, from Snorro Sturlason down, very much indebted. He may be said to have given the tone to history-writing in Iceland, and it was a high tone. [Footnote 247: For a critical estimate of Ari's literary activity and the extent of his work, the reader is referred to Moebius, _Are's Islaenderbuch_, Leipsic, 1869; Maurer, "Ueber Ari Thorgilsson und sein Islaenderbuch," in _Germania_, xv.; Olsen, _Ari Thorgilsson hinn Frodhi_, Reykjavik, 1889, pp. 214-240.] [Sidenote: Ari's significant allusion to Vinland.] Unfortunately Ari's Islendinga-bok has perished. One cannot help suspecting that it may have contained the contemporary materials from which Eric the Red's Saga in the Hauks-bok was ultimately drawn. For Ari made an abridgment or epitome of his great book, and this epitome, commonly known as "Libellus Islandorum," still survives. In it Ari makes brief mention of Greenland, and refers to his paternal uncle, Thorkell Gellison, as authority for his statements. This Thorkell Gellison, of Helgafell, a man of high consideration who flourished about the middle of the eleventh century, had visited Greenland and talked with one of the men who accompanied Eric when he went to settle in Brattahlid in 986. From this source Ari gives us the interesting information that Eric's party found in Greenland "traces of human habitations, fragments of boats, and stone implements; so from this one might conclude that people of the kind who inhabited Vinland and were known by the (Norse) Greenlanders as Skraelings must have roamed about there."[248] Observe the force of this allusion. The settlers in Greenland did not at first (nor for a long time) meet with barbarous or savage natives there, but only with the vestiges of their former presence. But when Ari wrote the above passage, the memory of Vinland and its fierce Skraelings was still fresh, and Ari very properly inferred from the archaeological remains in Greenland that a people similar (in point of barbarism) to the Skraelings must have been there. Unless Ari and his readers had a distinct recollection of the accounts of Vinland, such a reference would