Next it is said that whereas, in the Flatey version, Leif’s discovery is represented as the result of an expedition deliberately equipped to investigate Bjarni’s reports, it is uniformly described in every other account as an accidental episode of his return voyage from the court of Olaf Tryggvason in Norway. Here again it must be remembered that Leif was by this time a Greenlander, as to the exact details of whose exploits Iceland was likely to be imperfectly informed and but little interested. The main facts of his career might be known: that he was a son of Eric the Red, that he sailed to Norway and introduced Christianity to Greenland, that he rescued a crew of shipwrecked persons—more especially if, as related in the Flatey Book, one of these was the Icelandic heroine Gudrid—that he discovered somehow and at some time Wineland the Good, and thereby gave rise to Karlsefni’s subsequent expedition. More exact knowledge was not necessary as a prelude to the story of the adventures of the Icelandic hero Karlsefni; in fact, in so far as there is likely to have been any conscious interference with the truth, it may be observed that the less Leif’s voyage was dwelt on the greater would be the credit attaching to the later explorer, in whom alone Icelanders were likely to be generally interested. Such a state of things was eminently calculated to produce the fusion by tradition of two voyages into one, which was likely to be more generally known for two obvious reasons. In the first place, Leif’s voyage to Norway and his return with Olaf Tryggvason’s mission to Greenland was an important fact in the history of that proselytizing king. In the second, it was of interest to the priests who became the historians both of Iceland and Norway. As I have urged already, merger rather than expansion is the normal trend of tradition. The ‘man in the street’ at the present day might well be acquainted, for example, with an incident in the career of Captain Cook, without being able accurately to assign it to the correct voyage of the navigator, or indeed without being certain as to the exact number of the voyages for which he was distinguished. It is far more likely, in my opinion, that such a merger took place in Leif’s story as usually summarized in Iceland than that an imaginary and distinct voyage should have been invented and described with much circumstance and detail. But, it is said, the Flatey Book’s account stands alone, while that of Hauk, short as it is, is corroborated elsewhere, by a body of independent evidence. On examination, however, this body of evidence shrinks to the dimensions of a single passage, repeated in one context with unimportant verbal variations in a number of different manuscripts.