It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the circle of the initiated has been so restricted. The principal works dealing with the question, with very few exceptions, are either written in foreign tongues, or entombed in the pages of inaccessible scientific periodicals or in works mainly concerned with a wider field, or have been published so long ago that as the life of books goes nowadays the man in the street can hardly be expected to have read or to have remembered them. Reeves’ _Finding of Wineland the Good_, one of the likeliest books on the subject to have fallen into the hands of the general reader, is now more than twenty years old. How many books—other than standard classics—of a similar age, come under the eyes of members of the ordinary public? It must be confessed, too, that a taste for Icelandic literature is not widely prevalent in this country. The man in the street, if the author’s experience of him is typical, does not find the method of story-telling which enthralled contemporary Icelandic audiences at all to his mind. He cannot stomach the long genealogies, on which no doubt the original reader or listener insisted in order that he might add to the story the flavour of personal interest arising from the inclusion of ancestors, friends, or acquaintances. He gets confused and irritated by names of unfamiliar sound, with uncouth nicknames attached, many of the former closely resembling one another. When he has at length managed to become engrossed in some thread of the story, he finds himself suddenly switched off to follow the fortunes of other characters, the previous mention of whom he had forgotten, and finally losing his bearings he throws the book down in disgust. The present writer has on this account considered carefully whether it would not have been better to transpose the two parts of this work, putting the translation last, but he feels that such an arrangement would be illogical, and would make the arguments used in discussing the question much more difficult to follow. As a sop to the indolent he has, however, marked in the table of contents the parts of the story dealing with the American discoveries, though he feels personally that those who skip the remainder will miss some very interesting matter, including the vivid description of the sibyl’s séance.