Dr. Nansen, however, writes (vol. ii, p. 77): ‘I am unable to read Ari’s meaning in this way. He uses the present tense: “calla”, and what one “calls Skrælings” must presumably be a people one knows, and not one that one’s ancestors had met with more than a hundred years ago.’ On this line of reasoning, if I speak of ‘the man whom Carlyle _calls_ the Sea-Green Incorruptible’, I mean to imply that Robespierre and Carlyle were contemporaries. Dr. Nansen further refers (loc. cit.) to the parallel passage in Ari, mentioning the Irish monks in Iceland ‘whom the Norwegians call (calla) Papar’.[85] ‘From these words’, he says, ‘it might be concluded, with as much justification as from the statement about the traces of Skrælings, that the newcomers did not come in contact with the earlier people; but in the latter case this is incredible, and moreover conflicts with Ari’s own words.’ Let us examine this statement. In the first place it is clear from Ari’s statement, ‘they went away afterwards’, that none were left at the time of writing, yet he still says, in conformity with normal grammatical usage, that the Norsemen ‘call’, i.e. speak of, them as Papar. It is obvious, therefore, from the very passage to which Dr. Nansen appeals, that the use of the present tense does not denote the contemporary presence of the Irish monks, and it need not therefore indicate in the other passage the presence of any Skrælings in Ari’s time in the Greenland colony. In the second place, whereas in the Skræling passage Ari only mentions traces from which their former presence could be inferred, he begins his reference to the ‘Papar’ with the words, ‘_There were then Christians here_, those whom the Norsemen call “Papar”, but they went away afterwards ... and left behind’, &c. This passage therefore cannot be taken as affording any support to Dr. Nansen’s construction of the statement about the Skrælings. In another place (vol. ii, p. 16) Dr. Nansen suggests that the mention of traces of Skræling occupation without recording a meeting with the men themselves has an uncanny significance, suggesting that the Skrælings are treated as trolls. It seems more natural on the whole to construe the passage as meaning what it says—that the traces were there but not the men.