It is in the first place improbable that in the narrow confines of Iceland two quite independent versions of the same story should exist side by side. The original story-tellers in this country were peripatetic, there was a close intercourse between families residing in different parts of the island, and it would be strange if the tradition of one district had remained unaffected by that of another. But the point most universally admitted with regard to these two versions is that, except for certain introductory and genealogical points derived from a common source, the Landnámabók, while on the whole the facts correspond, the stories are obviously independent. This curious circumstance is at once explained if we suppose the historian of the Flatey Book to have had access to a saga composed in Greenland. Next, it is a marked and unique characteristic of the Flatey manuscript considered as a whole that the library from which it was derived was evidently rich in literature treating of the Scandinavian colonies which existed outside the confines of Iceland. This feature has been noticed by Vigfusson in his preface to the Orkney Saga in the Rolls Series (p. xxxii). ‘Its pages’, he writes of the Flatey Book, ‘preserve more than half of all we know of the older history of the Orkneys, the Faroes, Greenland, and Vineland (America). Indeed John Haconson and his two scribes seem for some reason, now unknown, to have paid particular attention to gathering up every scrap relating to these neighbour-lands of Outer, or Colonial, Scandinavia.’ It is therefore precisely in such a work as the Flatey Book that we might expect to find incorporated a saga derived from an outlandish source such as I have suggested. We know, too, that the practice of saga-telling went on in the new colony as in the old, as indeed was _a priori_ probable. In the Saga, of Eric the Red such a form of entertainment is expressly mentioned as a means whereby the nights of the Arctic winter were enlivened during the visit of Karlsefni to Brattahlid. The stock-in-trade of these Greenland story-tellers must inevitably have included a detailed account of the founder of the colony, thus supplying a rival ‘Eric’s Saga’ such as I have argued (_supra_, p. 108) that the Flatey Book is referring to in the passage where ‘Eric’s Saga’ is mentioned. Now, on turning to internal evidence, we shall find that corroboration of the theory advanced is by no means wanting. Not only does the Flatey Book, as has been remarked already, supply precisely those episodes in which Greenland rather than Iceland would be interested, e.g. Bjarni’s voyage, the circumstances, date, and details of Leif’s, and the full description of Eric’s family, but conversely, where Greenland interest would naturally cease, the Flatey Book is far less rich in detail than its rivals. Take, for example, the case of Gudrid. To Icelanders this lady was a most important character, the ancestress of many distinguished men.