On the other hand, numerous statements of a circumstantial nature are made in the Flatey version which find no place in the rival account. The important ‘eyktarstad’ observation (see Chapter V) is a good instance of this. The Flatey Book gives the south-westerly course which the necessities of the case, as known to us, demand, but we look in vain for such a course in Eric’s Saga or Hauk’s Book, which follow the current ideas of Icelandic geographers in reporting a uniform progress to the south. Is it suggested that the greater accuracy of the Flatey Book in this particular is a freak of a vivid but uninstructed imagination? The savages, sleeping under their boats, as Jacques Cartier found them centuries later, are also mentioned in the Flatey Book alone. It is true that the authors of this version, coming to the conclusion that all the explorers made the same landfall, have felt at liberty to draw the description of Leif’s camp from what appears to be a report of Karlsefni’s Hóp, but, assuming the latter place to have been actually discovered by Karlsefni, there is no evidence in this that another saga was consulted at all. In short, I can find no evidence whatever that the compilers of the Flatey Book version had any knowledge of the rival account known to us. It is true that Finnur Jónsson[70] considers that the reference to ‘Eric’s saga’ in the introductory matter quoted from Landnáma is to the document known to us by that name; but, with all respect to the views of so fine an Icelandic scholar, such a theory seems to me untenable. In the first place, in the passage in question the author must be alluding to a story so well known to his audience that he can refer them to it without hesitation. _A fortiori_ a story known to himself. Yet no one who had more than the haziest recollection of our Eric’s Saga could possibly make the wide departures from it which are characteristic of the Flatey version. Secondly, the reference to the ‘quarrels and fights’ between Eric and Thorgest suggests a detailed account of the whole dispute. Yet the matter omitted in the Flatey Book from that supplied by Landnáma, which is the source quoted by all our authorities at this stage, amounts to no more than a bare mention of the battle which brought about Eric’s banishment, and that on his return to Iceland which was the prelude to reconciliation. The omissions are in fact hardly longer than the explanation which the author inserts. The object of the reference being clearly to effect a saving of time or space, one must suppose that the allusion is to some fuller account. But even if the reference were to our Eric’s Saga, it would not disprove the independence of the Flatey version as a whole, since at this point the compiler has not reached the stage where he incorporates new matter, but is copying practically _verbatim_ an abridgement from Landnáma which is to be found in other texts of the Saga of Olaf Tryggvason.