Now the older version, written at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, gives an account of things which happened three centuries
before it was written. A cautious scholar will, as a rule, be slow to
consider any historical narrative as quite satisfactory authority, even
when it contains no improbable statements, unless it is nearly
contemporary with the events which it records. Such was the rule laid
down by the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and it is a very good rule;
the proper application of it has disencumbered history of much rubbish.
At the same time, like all rules, it should be used with judicious
caution and not allowed to run away with us. As applied by Lewis to
Roman history it would have swept away in one great cataclysm not only
kings and decemvirs, but Brennus and his Gauls to boot, and left us with
nothing to swear by until the invasion of Pyrrhus.[242] Subsequent
research has shown that this was going altogether too far. The mere fact
of distance in time between a document and the events which it records
is only negative testimony against its value, for it may be a faithful
transcript of some earlier document or documents since lost. It is so
difficult to prove a negative that the mere lapse of time simply raises
a presumption the weight of which should be estimated by a careful
survey of all the probabilities in the case. Among the many Icelandic
vellums that are known to have perished[243] there may well have been
earlier copies of Eric the Red's Saga.

[Footnote 242: Lewis's _Inquiry into the Credibility of the
Early Roman History_, 2 vols., London, 1855.]

[Footnote 243: And notably in that terrible fire of October,
1728, which consumed the University Library at Copenhagen, and
broke the heart of the noble collector of manuscripts, Arni
Magnusson. The great eruption of Hecla in 1390 overwhelmed two
famous homesteads in the immediate neighbourhood. From the
local history of these homesteads and their inmates, Vigfusson
thinks it not unlikely that some records may still be there
"awaiting the spade and pickaxe of a new Schliemann."
_Sturlunga Saga_, p. cliv.]

[Sidenote: Hauk Erlendsson and his manuscripts.]

Hauk Erlendsson reckoned himself a direct descendant, in the eighth
generation, from Snorro, son of Thorfinn and Gudrid, born in Vinland. He
was an important personage in Iceland, a man of