From the circumstance, too, that the story had to satisfy the inhabitants and the visitors of a number of different settlements, with an equal social status but with frequently conflicting interests, arose the characteristic which has often been noticed by students of Icelandic literature, that both or all sides of a question are stated fairly, the author or reciter being, as Vigfusson has put it, ‘a heathen with the heathen, a wrathful man with the avenger, and a sorrowful man with the mourner, as his style reflects the varied feelings of his _dramatis personae_’.[64] We have therefore the best of grounds for imagining that the exploits of those who fought, litigated, or explored in the tenth and eleventh centuries were carried with truth, impartiality, and accuracy over the brief interval which separated them from the age of written history, which dawned with Ari the Learned. _Ari the Learned._ This pioneer of Icelandic history and of the age of writing was born, as we learn from the Icelandic Annals, in the year following the Norman conquest of England (1067). His grandfather, Gelli, was a contemporary of Karlsefni, and was in fact his second cousin. (See Genealogical Table, p. 20.) We are expressly told by Ari that his uncle, Thorkel Gellison, supplied him with information relating to Eric the Red, which he had obtained from direct speech with one of the latter’s companions. The events with which we are concerned thus fall within a period bridged by one human memory from the time of occurrence to the period when they could be recorded in writing, and when written history, as superseding oral tradition, may be said to begin. It is moreover worthy of note in passing that the most important explorer with whom these sagas deal, Thorfin Karlsefni, was of the same stock as Ari, and must almost necessarily have been personally known to one of his informants, his uncle Thorkel. It should also be remarked that one of the persons for whom Ari expressly tells us that he composed his Íslendíngabók, and to whom he showed it, was Bishop Thorlak, the grandson of that Snorri who, as we are told in the saga, was born to Karlsefni in Wineland.