‘This land’, says Dr. Nansen, ‘is the parallel to Helluland, where there were a number of Arctic foxes.’ Now there seems to me no reason why an Icelandic writer of the thirteenth century should have discredited the possibility of these Brobdingnagian ants. Yet he describes merely Arctic foxes, animals differing in every way about as widely from these ants as could well be imagined. They are not insects, they are not large, they are not dangerous or formidable. They are animals actually to be found in the northern parts of the American continent, and the locality where they are found is correctly described as a land of rocks, and not a beach at all. Is it credible that the one story, accurate in every particular, could have been derived by the exercise of any amount of imagination from the other? Set your children to rationalize Maelduin’s story, and see if you will get the ants turned to foxes in any single case. Next we hear of ‘a great lofty island with terraces around it and rows of trees on which there were many large birds’. ‘This island’, says Dr. Nansen, ‘might correspond to the wooded Markland, with its many animals, where Karlsefni and his people killed a bear.’ Then where is the island, or where are the terraces, or the loftiness, or the birds, none of them features, one would have thought, which the most rationalistic need have hesitated to retain? We have, on the contrary, a low-lying land, apparently mainland, wooded indeed, but otherwise unlike in every single particular. Next we read of a sandy island, inhabited by a beast like a horse with dog’s paws and claws. Next a flat island with marks of horses’ hoofs as large as a ship’s sail, nutshells of marvellous size, and traces of human occupation. Next comes a lofty island with a great house sumptuously furnished, into which the waves of the sea threw salmon. Here Dr. Nansen might claim, with Fluellen, ‘salmons in both’, but this has not usually been regarded as a convincing analogy. Lastly we are told of an island encompassed by a great cliff with a single tree growing on it. A branch of this Maelduin caught, and held for three days while sailing by the island, at the end of which time there were three apples at the end of the branch. Not even grapes! I am not sure, in spite of some ambiguous phrases, that in quoting this long passage Dr. Nansen wishes to emphasize many similarities beyond the recurrence of a certain number of periods of three days. But the description is convenient for my purposes as affording a characteristic example of the type of legend from which it is suggested that most of the features of the saga were derived. And I ask myself in vain where is the slightest trace to be found of one story in the other, except that both are voyages of discovery? _Correspondence with actual Facts._