tly grew to a population of
fifty thousand people, having flocks and herds, solid houses of stone,
and a fine trade in fish and oil with the countries of Northern Europe.
These settlers in Iceland attained to a high standard of civilization.
They had many books, and were fond of tales and stories, as are all
these northern peoples who spend long winter evenings round the
fireside. Some of the sagas, or stories, which they told were true
accounts of the voyages and adventures of their forefathers; others
were fanciful stories, like our modern romances, created by the
imagination; others, again, were a mixture of the two. Thus it is
sometimes hard to distinguish fact and fancy in these early tales of
the Norsemen. We have, however, means of testing the stories. Among the
books written in Iceland there was one called the 'National Name-Book,'
in which all the names of the people were written down, with an account
of their forefathers and of any notable things which they had done.

It is from this book and from the old sagas that we learn how the
Norsemen came to the coast of America. It seems that about 900 a
certain man called Gunnbjorn was driven westward in a great storm and
thrown on the rocky shore of an ice-bound country, where he spent the
winter. Gunnbjorn reached home safely, and never tried again to find
this new land; but, long after his death, the story that there was land
farther west still lingered among the settlers in Iceland and the
Orkneys, and in other homes of the Norsemen. Some time after
Gunnbjorn's voyage it happened that a very bold and determined man
called Eric the Red, who lived in the Orkneys, was made an outlaw for
having killed several men in a quarrel. Eric fled westward over the
seas about the year 980, and he came to a new country with great rocky
bays and fjords as in Norway. There were no trees, but the slopes of
the hillsides were bright with grass, so he called the country
Greenland, as it is called to this day. Eric and his men lived in
Greenland for three years, and the ruins of their rough stone houses
are still to be seen, hard by one of the little Danish settlements of
to-day. When Eric and his followers went back to Iceland they told of
what they had seen, and soon he led a new expedition to Greenland. The
adventurers went in twenty-five ships; more than half were lost on the
way, but eleven ships landed safely and founded a colony in Greenland.
Other settlers came, and this Green