ded on the
savages, and catching up a slain man's sword, puts them all to flight
with her fierce visage and fierce cries--Freydisa the Terrible, who, in
another voyage, persuades her husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, when
asleep, and murder them and all their men; and then, when he will not
murder the five women too, takes up an axe and slays them all herself,
and getting back to Greenland, when the dark and unexplained tale comes
out, lives unpunished, but abhorred henceforth. All these folks, I say,
are no phantoms, but realities; at least, if I can judge of internal
evidence.

But, beyond them, and hovering on the verge of Mythus and fairy land,
there is a ballad called 'Finn the Fair,' and how

An upland Earl had twa braw sons,
My story to begin;
The tane was hight Haldane the strong,
The tither was winsome Finn.

and so forth; which was still sung, with other 'rimur,' or ballads, in
the Faroes, at the end of the last century. Professor Rafn has inserted
it, because it talks of Vinland as a well-known place, and because the
brothers are sent by the princess to slay American kings; but that Rime
has another value.

It is of a beauty so perfect, and yet so like the old Scotch ballads in
its heroic conception of love, and in all its forms and its qualities,
that it is one proof more, to any student of early European poetry, that
we and these old Norsemen are men of the same blood. Your own Professor
Longfellow may know it far better than I, who am no Norse scholar. But,
if he does, might I beg him to translate it some day, as none but he can
translate? It is so sad, that no tenderness less exquisite than his can
prevent its being painful; and, at least in its denouement, so naive,
that no purity less exquisite than his can prevent its being dreadful.
But the Rime is as worthy of Mr. Longfellow as he is worthy of the Rime.

If anything more important than is told by Professor Rafn and Mr. Black
{71} be now known to the antiquarians of Massachussets, let me entreat
them to pardon my ignorance. But let me record my opinion that, though
somewhat too much may have been made in past years of certain
rock-inscriptions, and so forth, on this side of the Atlantic, there can
be no reasonable doubt that our own race landed and tried to settle on
the shore of New England six hundred years before their kinsmen, and, in
many cases, their actual descendants, the august Pilgrim Fathers of the
17