f mouth." And Vigfusson,[6-3] in speaking of the sagas in general, says:
"We believe that when once the first saga was written down, the others
were in quick succession committed to parchment, some still keeping their
original form through a succession of copies, others changed. The saga
time was short and transitory, as has been the case with the highest
literary periods of every nation, whether we look at the age of Pericles
in Athens, or of our own Elizabeth in England, and that which was not
written down quickly, in due time, was lost and forgotten forever."

The absence of contemporary record has caused some American historians
to view the narratives of the Vinland voyages as ordinary hearsay. But it
is important to remember that before the age of writing in Iceland there
was a saga-telling age, a most remarkable period of intellectual
activity, by means of which the deeds and events of the seething life of
the heroic age were carried over into the age of writing.[7-1] The
general trustworthiness of this saga-telling period has been attested in
numerous ways from foreign records. Thus Snorri Sturlason's "The Sagas of
the Kings of Norway," one of the great history books of the world,
written in Iceland in the thirteenth century, was based primarily on
early tradition, brought over the sea to Iceland. Yet the exactness of
its descriptions and the reliability of its statements have been verified
in countless cases by modern Norwegian historians.[7-2]

With reference to the Vinland voyages, there is proof of an unusually
strong tradition in the fact that it has come down from two sources, the
only case of such a phenomenon among the Icelandic sagas proper. It does
not invalidate the general truth of the tradition that these two sources
clash in various matters. These disagreements are not so serious but that
fair-minded American scholars have found it "easy to believe that the
narratives contained in the sagas are true in their general outlines and
important features." It lies within the province of Old Norse scholarship
to determine which of the two Vinland sagas has the better literary and
historical antecedents. After this point has been established, the
truthfulness and credibility of the selected narrative in its details
must be maintained on the internal evidence in conjunction with the
geographical and other data of early America. And here American
scholarship may legitimately speak.

These sagas have in recent