The Discovery of America by the Northmen, 985-1015

ere written out as we have them to-day, more than a hundred years before the discoveries of Columbus were made in the West Indies,[4] or those of John Cabot on our northern Atlantic shores. The writers of these sagas had no information derived from other sources on which to build up the fabric of their story. To believe that the agreement of the narratives in their general outlines with the facts as we now know them was accidental, a mere matter of chance, is impossible. The coincidences are so many, and the events so far removed from anything that the authors had themselves ever seen, or of which they had any knowledge, that it becomes easier and more reasonable to accept the narratives in their general features than to deny the authenticity of the records. If we reject them, we must on the same principle reject the early history of all the civilized peoples of the earth, since that history has been obtained in all cases more or less directly from oral tradition.

In their general scope, therefore, the