e of actors
and eye-witnesses, to attempt imposition on whom would have been useless
as well as ridiculous. Hence those old songs and sagas had their
foundation in truth. After they were once launched into the memories of
men, the form of words, doubtless, tended to protect them to some extent
from adulteration, and even when all allowance is made for man's
well-known tendency to invent and exaggerate, it still remains likely
that _all_ the truth would be retained, although surrounded more or less
with fiction. To distinguish the true from the false in such cases is
not so difficult a process as one at first sight might suppose. Men
with penetrating minds and retentive memories, who are trained to such
work, are swift to detect the chaff amongst the wheat, and although in
their winnowing operations they may frequently blow away a few grains of
wheat, they seldom or never accept any of the chaff as good grain.

We urge all this upon the reader, because the narratives and poems which
were composed and related by Karlsefin and his friends that winter,
doubtless contained those truths which were not taken out of the
traditionary state, collected and committed to writing by the Icelandic
saga-writers, until about one hundred years afterwards, at the end of
the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century.

On these winter evenings, too, Karlsefin sometimes broached the subject
of the new religion, which had been so recently introduced into
Greenland. He told them that he had not received much instruction in
it, so that he could not presume to explain it all to them, but added
that he had become acquainted with the name and some of the precepts of
Jesus Christ, and these last, he said, seemed to him so good and so true
that he now believed in Him who taught them, and would not exchange that
belief for all the riches of this world, "for," said he, "the world we
dwell in is passing away--that to which we go shall never pass away."
His chief delight in the new religion was that Jesus Christ was
described as a Saviour from sin, and he thought that to be delivered
from wicked thoughts in the heart and wicked deeds of the body was the
surest road to perfect happiness.

The Norsemen listened to all this with profound interest, for none of
them were so much wedded to their old religion as to feel any jealousy
of the new; but although they thought much about it, they spoke little,
for all were aware that the two religions could