4. The account of Leif given in the Flatey Book, on the other hand, is extremely circumstantial and detailed and appears to have been written from a more intimate knowledge of the facts. 5. The normal course of tradition is rather to blend many voyages into one than to expand one voyage, in one and the same story, into many. One other point may be mentioned. Part at all events of the Flatey Book version is accepted by the majority of those who have studied the subject, especially the observation recorded of the length of the shortest day, which is indeed one of the most circumstantial points to be found in any of these stories. Now assuming this observation to be correctly attributed to Leif, and it is recorded of no one else, then it is plain that Leif must have wintered in the new country, and at the most southerly point in it to which he penetrated. The alternative accounts are one and all wholly inconsistent with any such idea. According to these, Wineland was discovered by Leif while endeavouring to return from Norway to Greenland in the summer of the year 1000. In the first place, at least two of the texts giving this version of the story state distinctly, and the others imply, that he arrived in Greenland in the year in which he set sail. (Cf. Fríssbók: ‘He came in the autumn to Greenland’, and the passage occurring in the body of the Flatey Book’s Saga of Olaf Tryggvason: ‘He came at the end of that summer to Greenland.’) But apart from these statements we may ask ourselves,—is it likely that Leif would have passed the winter in Wineland, unless he came there on a definite voyage of exploration? On the hypothesis of accident he had come, and knew he had come, a tremendous distance out of his way by the time he made land on the coast of America. Would he have had either the supplies or the inclination to stay the winter in the newly discovered land? Supposing that—as the Flatey Book tells us—he arrived first at Helluland, why should he have sailed south across open sea from that point if his destination was Greenland? If he followed the coast he would arrive in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and would come across nothing resembling the Wineland of the story.[74] And it is incredible that he should have put directly to sea in the direction opposite to his objective and happened by chance upon the two more southerly ‘lands’. Again, if we suppose him to have gone through the experience recorded of Bjarni, is it not still more unlikely that he would have elected to pass the whole autumn and winter in the very first place at which he touched, without provisions and so very far from home? Would he not at least have sailed for Greenland after a very cursory examination of the country, however much he might have contemplated returning thither on another occasion? Even if we reject the circumstantial version of the Flatey Book altogether and attribute the observation of the sun to Karlsefni, of whom it is nowhere recorded, it