as the Saga of Eric the Red: coming from a common archetype they of course afford no independent corroboration of one another. _Independence of the Flatey Version._ That such corroboration is, however, afforded by the version contained in the Flatey Book is, I think, clear to demonstration. But for the attitude of some modern writers on the subject, the independence of this account might be said to be beyond dispute, whatever its relative value as an authority might be. Some commentators have, however, attempted to establish that the Flatey Book is but an embroidery based on the rival text. Thus Mr. Juul Dieserud, in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (1901), states boldly that the Flatey Book ‘borrowed incidents and descriptions from the story of Thorfin’. He adds: ‘This may seem to be a hazardous conjecture, but ... the only way out of it is to regard the saga of Thorfin as the result of a similar process.’ The alternative, however, with which Mr. Dieserud here considers himself to be faced, is by no means the only one. The depositions of two witnesses to a matter of fact may show many points of agreement as well as discrepancies without any collusion or borrowing whatsoever. So, too, different authors may treat of a question of history or tradition without having consulted each other’s works. Again, if I and a friend go through some experience together—suppose, for instance, that we serve in the same unit during the war—the accounts which we transmit to our respective descendants may be quite independent of one another. A charge of plagiarism, under such conditions, needs to be established by definite and cogent evidence. Now what does Mr. Dieserud put forward as proof or support of his contention? He says, for example, ‘an incident related of the stalwart Freydis and the short mention of some quarrels caused by the women during the last winter in Straumsfjord sets somebody’s imagination working till we get a gruesome tale of her separate expedition to Wineland in company with the brothers Helgi and Finnbogi’. The quarrels over (not otherwise caused by) the women in the Saga of Eric the Red are of a purely sexual character. The bachelors, we are told, coveted the wives of the married men. This situation, though hardly unique, might well provide an imaginative mind with a plot like that of a modern problem novel. But where is anything of the kind to be traced in the Flatey Book story of Freydis? There is no quarrel about women; in fact, feminine charm was hardly Freydis’s strong point. There is a purely mercenary dispute about the ownership of a boat, in which a person who is incidentally a woman plays the principal part. In short, there is no sort of connexion between the two plots; it might as well be said that the story of Jezebel and Naboth was a plagiarism from that of David and Bathsheba.