From this passage, as given by Hauk, it has been understood by Storm and some other authorities that after rounding Keelness the explorers came upon mountains which they imagined, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the same range as others which they had met with at Hóp. Now the first point which occurs to one in this connexion is that the passage in question had, at an earlier date than that of any extant manuscript of the text, already become so corrupt as to be unintelligible. We can hardly regard the later half of the sentence as a gloss by Hauk: it is not characteristic of his work to make so considerable an addition to the matter copied. Still less can we suppose that the compilers of Eric’s Saga, who never retained any prejudice in favour of making sense of a passage, introduced the words ‘to explore’. It looks, in fact, as if at a very early date two inconsistent attempts had been made to interpret a phrase the meaning of which was already dubious. It is therefore a very dangerous passage on which to found any important conclusion. Secondly, as has been already suggested, the passage about Thorvald bears all the marks of an interpolation. It comes between two sentences referring to the return to Straumsfjord which look as if the saga-writer were taking up the thread of his principal theme after a digression. It follows immediately after what is obviously information from a fresh source—the passage beginning ‘Some men say’. It introduces Thorvald suddenly for the first time, if we accept the purer version of Eric’s Saga (cf. p. 126). It is embellished with a speech plagiarized from elsewhere, a form of treatment without parallel in the saga. Towards the end of the suggested interpolation the words ‘they went back’ are twice repeated in Eric’s Saga. In these circumstances it seems fairly safe to regard this passage as having formed no part of the original story. But if this be so, the sentence now under consideration, which mentions Hóp and Straumsfjord, cannot belong to the interpolated matter, but must be part of the original saga, and in this case it cannot refer to the topography of Thorvald’s voyage, but to the relation between Straumsfjord and Hóp. In the third place, it seems unlikely that unscientific explorers would recognize two ends of a range of mountains as belonging to one another if separated by a long sea-voyage; the phrase ‘þat staediz mjök svá á’ (were therefore close opposite one another) seems to refer to a closer connexion, such as that of two sides of the same hill, which would be much more readily recognized. The conclusions to be drawn are therefore: 1. The passage is too corrupt to allow of any important argument being based on it. 2. It is at least doubtful whether it refers to Thorvald’s voyage at all.