neland and fought with wild men," they
said. "Snorri is his son. He is the first and last Winelander, for no
one will ever go there again. It will be an empty and forgotten land."

And so it was for a long time. Some wise men wrote down the story of
those voyages and of that land, and people read the tale and liked it,
but no one remembered where the place was. It all seemed like a fairy
tale. Long afterwards, however, men began to read those stories with
wide-open eyes and to wonder. They guessed and talked together, and
studied this and that land, and read the story over and over. At last
they have learned that Wineland was in America, on the eastern shore of
the United States, and they have called Snorri the first American, and
have put up statues of Leif Ericsson, the first comer to America.[15]

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTES:

[15] See note about Eskimos on page 199.

Descriptive Notes

_House._ In a rich Norseman's home were many buildings. The finest and
largest was the great feast hall. Next were the bower, where the women
worked, and the guest house, where visitors slept. Besides these were
storehouses, stables, work-shops, a kitchen, a sleeping-house for
thralls. All these buildings were made of heavy, hewn logs, covered with
tar to fill the cracks and to keep the wood from rotting. The ends of
the logs, the door-posts, the peaks of gables, were carved into shapes
of men and animals and were painted with bright colors. These gay
buildings were close together, often set around the four sides of a
square yard. That yard was a busy and pleasant place, with men and women
running across from one bright building to another. Sometimes a high
fence with one gate went around all this, and only the tall, carved
peaks of roofs showed from the outside.

_Names._ An old Norse story says: "Most men had two names in one, and
thought it likeliest to lead to long life and good luck to have double
names." To be called after a god was very lucky. Here are some of those
double names with their meanings: "Thorstein" means Thor's stone;
"Thorkel" means Thor's fire; "Thorbiorn" means Thor's bear; "Gudbrand"
means Gunnr's sword (Gunnr was one of the Valkyrias[16]); "Gunnbiorn"
means Gunnr's bear; "Gudrid" means Gunnr's rider; "Gudrod" means
Gunnr's land-clearer. (Most of the land in old Norway was covered with
forests. When a man got new land he had to clear off the trees.) In
those olden days a man did not have a surname