This fiord is a grand inlet from the sea, and is from two to five miles wide. To all appearances, it is a great river, flowing along majestically between its banks. It does not, however, stand alone, for there are many others in Greenland that much resemble it. It is one of a multitude of similar inlets that give such peculiar character to the Greenland coast. In fact, there is no other coast like it, if we except that of Norway. But, unlike the fiords of Norway, glaciers descend into nearly all of them. These glaciers, by their steady growth, have changed the aspect of the country greatly since the Northmen first went there and gave it the name which it at present bears. That it is a misnomer, need hardly be mentioned, though the application of it came about in a very simple way. Davis’s “Land of Desolation” suits the country much better than Eric’s “Greenland.” The name Ericsfiord, like that of Magellan’s Strait, Hispaniola, etc., commemorates a discovery. Perhaps I should rather say, like that of America, it commemorates a _re_-discovery; for as America was known long before Columbus’s time, so also was Greenland before Eric’s, if we are to credit (and we have no reason to doubt them) the ancient sagas of Iceland. According to these, one Gunnibiorn landed in Greenland in the year 872. Eric was a high-spirited son of a jarl of Jadar, in Norway, who, opposing the encroachments of the king upon his feudal rights, in common with his class, was forced to flee the country. Escaping with his son, he established himself in Iceland, which was then being peopled by such refugees from tyranny and wrong, and a society was being formed which, for love of liberty and the actual possession of republican freedom, has never been excelled. These Icelanders were then, and they continued to be for centuries afterwards, the most intellectual and refined people of the north of Europe; and this is not surprising when it is remembered that the best blood of Norway and Denmark went to swell its population. In fact, Iceland gave literature and laws to the whole of Scandinavia. The child was wiser than the parent. Her writers first put in shape the Norse mythology; and many of the most distinguished families of Norway and Denmark are now proud to trace their origin back to the old freedom-loving jarls and sea-kings who founded a nation upon a rock which had been forced up by terrestrial fires into an atmosphere so cold and forbidding that the snows gathered upon its lofty summits, while volcanic heat wrestled in the bowels of its mountains.