popular hero: the creation of a fictitious hero in addition to the real one is, I submit, the reverse of the normal process. Thus, the legends which grew up about Charlemagne endowed that hero with the achievements of earlier Frankish kings and chieftains, and in particular absorbed and confused with Charlemagne his ancestor, Charles Martel. The national traditions of centuries were annexed and grouped round Charlemagne and his circle. On a smaller scale, much the same sort of process can occasionally be traced in saga literature. For instance, the earlier versions of the Landnámabók mention a certain Helgi Thorbrandson, who sailed with Eric to Greenland, and was accordingly less known in Iceland than his brothers, who figure largely in the Eyrbyggja Saga. This saga, therefore, ignores Helgi, and does not mention him among the sons of Thorbrand of Alptafjord. Similarly later editions of Landnáma substitute for Helgi’s name that of his brother Snorri, who went out later to Greenland, and was better known in Iceland. The less-known figure disappears and his history becomes absorbed in that of the better-known character. Such is the normal and natural working of tradition. Prof. Gustav Storm, in his _Studier over Vinlandsreiserne_, makes a great point of the fact that though Bjarni’s voyage is represented as taking place about A.D. 986 nothing was done in the nature of further exploration for a period of about sixteen years. I fail to see the force of this argument. It was not till about a century had elapsed from the time when Gunnbjörn, son of Ulf Kráka, sighted an unknown coast to the west of Iceland, that Eric the Red, having made his adopted country too hot to hold him, followed in his track to Greenland. The battered and storm-tossed remnant who successfully accomplished the emigration to Eric’s new colony had little motive, in Bjarni’s bald description of unattractive coasts sighted from shipboard, to induce them to tempt Providence again. Leif, Eric’s son and the explorer of the future, was born in Iceland after the death of his grandfather, and was in all probability still a child. He is the only son of Eric mentioned in Landnámabók, which is concerned with the Icelandic pedigrees only. On coming of age, and accomplishing the remarkable voyage from Greenland to Norway, having next carried out the difficult task of converting his countrymen to Christianity, it was time for him to look about for fresh worlds to conquer. The old story was recalled, the ship was manned, and the first real discovery and exploration of the new countries was effected, an exploit for which, in the Flatey Book as elsewhere, Leif receives the entire credit, just as his father, and not Gunnbjörn, is everywhere described as the ‘discoverer’ of Greenland. _Leif’s Voyage._