We may now pass on to consider the sources from which the present translation is drawn. The existing manuscripts, it will be found, are none of them earlier than the fourteenth century, but it may be well to point out that this fact is not so damaging to their credit as might be supposed. The day of oral tradition was long over, the day of documentary history had been long established, and the compilers of those versions which we now possess must have worked in the main not from oral tradition, but from earlier written sagas which had then attained to a large extent the form in which we have them. A well-known passage in the Sturlunga Saga is not without a bearing on this point. ‘Nearly all stories.’ it says, ‘which had been made in Iceland before Bishop Brand Sæmundson died (A.D. 1201) had been committed to writing; but stories of things which have taken place since were hardly committed to writing at all before the skald Sturla Thordson dictated the Iceland Sagas.’ Now while we may admit, with Vigfusson, that this passage has reference primarily to the three sagas which have at this point been incorporated in Sturlunga, it is clear that ‘nearly all stories’ cannot be a statement confined to three, and must have a general reference to the condition of all the stories known at that date. It follows that any events which took place before 1201 had in all probability assumed a more or less fixed written form before Sturla (born _c._ 1217) started to write down the later occurrences. The contributions of later scribes would appear to have been confined for the most part to bringing the genealogies down to their own day; the fashion of romanticizing the earlier material to any great extent did not become general till a later date than those which we have to consider. That Eric’s Saga had assumed a written form before the Flatey Book version was compiled is evident from the reference to it in the opening chapter of that story: ‘Thence arose the quarrels and fights between Eric and Thorgest which are related in Eric’s Saga.’ How far the saga of Eric known to the compilers of the Flatey Book corresponded with any work which now bears the same name is a question which cannot be adequately discussed till we have considered further the nature and authenticity of the versions from which the translation has been derived.[67] _Hauk’s Book and the Saga of Eric the Red._ Our knowledge of the Wineland voyages is obtained, as the careful reader of the translation will discover, from two apparently independent sources, which may for convenience be described as Hauk’s version and that of the Flatey Book. The story as known to Hauk is found in two manuscripts: one contained in Hauk’s Book and partly written by his own hand; the other, in an early fifteenth-century hand, is No. 557 4to in the collection of Arne Magnusson, and is most conveniently designated—according to its actual title—as the Saga of Eric the Red.