We start then from the certain fact that Herjulf, Bjarni’s father, has sailed to Greenland about the summer of 986. If he had a sailor son, absent in Norway on a trading voyage, that son on his return to Iceland would almost certainly endeavour to rejoin his parent in the new colony. All the best available pilots are gone, neither Bjarni nor his crew have any clear knowledge of the seas they will have to traverse, and it is with a knowledge of their risk, clearly stated, that they start sailing west in the direction of Greenland, separated from them by a distance imperfectly known, and also, if there is the slightest deviation to the south of Cape Farewell, in the direction of America. To America we are accordingly informed that they came, driven thither by suitable winds and weather. From America, without landing, without any information to impart as to these strange countries, they returned to Greenland, and Iceland saw no more of Bjarni thenceforward. As fiction, it is a pointless and barren narrative, whatever may be its historical interest to persons of a post-Columbian age. It was evidently disappointing to those who heard and to those who subsequently wrote the story. So far from being treated as a hero, as Professor Fischer would have us believe, we are told that Bjarni received nothing but blame for his lack of enterprise and curiosity on the occasion which chance and unsuccessful navigation had thrown in his way. These were not circumstances favourable to the perpetuation of a story devoid of incident in itself and redounding in no way to the credit of the chief actor in it. It would not be surprising to find that even in Greenland Bjarni’s adventure was not long remembered. The disappearance of the tale from Iceland is _a fortiori_ immensely more probable. The interest of narrator and audience alike were in that country exceptionally domestic. It is the rarest possible exception to hear in Icelandic sagas of the exploits of anyone who had permanently left the country, and whose life never again threw him in contact with Icelanders. Bjarni, from the time he set sail from Eyrarbakki, was, short of a miracle, ‘out of the story’, as the Icelandic narrators would have put it. That the popular account of the voyages of Karlsefni and his predecessors should contain no mention of Bjarni is in accordance with every probability. The alternative appears to me to violate everything that experience teaches us of the development of tradition here and elsewhere. A person, possibly it is said fictitious, at best wholly devoid of interest for Icelandic audiences, is credited with an extremely featureless voyage, from which he derives no sort of kudos, the effect of which is—if anything—to some extent to impair the glory of the Icelander Karlsefni. Such inaccuracy as characterizes tradition has, it may be said with the utmost confidence, the effect of merging the exploits of the less well known with those of the more