The first authentic reference, now recoverable, to Vinland the Good has already been referred to. It occurs in a passage in the _Iselandinga Vók_, by Ari Thorgilsson, the oldest Icelandic historiographer. Ari, surnamed froði, or the learned, was born A.D. 1067, and survived till 1148. The earliest manuscript of the Saga of Eric the Red dates as late as A.D. 1330. It is contained in the Arna Magnæan Codex, commonly known as _Hauks Vók_. Hauk Erlendsson, to whom the preservation of this copy of the original Saga is due, and by whom part of it appears to have been written, has appended to the manuscript a genealogy, in which he traces his descent from the son of Karlsefne, born in Vinland. Two versions of the narrative have been preserved, differing only in slight details; and of those Reeves says: “They afford the most graphic and succinct exposition of the discovery; and, supported as they are throughout by contemporary history, appear in every respect most worthy of credence.”[9] The simple, unadorned narrative bears out the idea that it is a manuscript of information derived from the statements of the actual explorers. The later story of Barni Herjulfson,—an obvious amplification of the original narrative, with a change of names, and many spurious additions,—occurs in the Flatey Book, a manuscript written before the close of the fourteenth century, when the Northmen of the Scandinavian fatherland were reawakening to an interest in the memories or traditions of early voyages to strange lands beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and fashioning them into legend and romance. The poet, William Morris, represents the Vikings of the fourteenth century following the old leadings of Leif Ericson in search of the earthly paradise:— That desired gate To immortality and blessed rest Within the landless waters of the West. The time chosen is that of England’s Edward III., and, still more, of England’s Chaucer. But in reality all memory of the land which lay beyond the waters of the Atlantic had faded as utterly from the minds of Europe’s mariners, in that fourteenth century, as in the older days when Plato restored a lost Atlantis to give local habitation to his ideal Republic. When the idea revived in the closing years of the fifteenth century, not as a philosophic dream, but as a legitimate induction of science, the reception which it met with from the embodied wisdom of that age, curiously illustrates the common experience of the pioneers in every path of novel discovery.