erudition, author of a
brief book of contemporary annals and a treatise on arithmetic in which
he introduced the Arabic numerals into Iceland. In those days the lover
of books, if he would add them to his library, might now and then obtain
an original manuscript, but usually he had to copy them or have them
copied by hand. The Hauks-bok, with its 200 skins, one of the most
extensive Icelandic vellums now in existence, is really Hauk's private
library, or what there is left of it, and it shows that he was a man who
knew how to make a good choice of books. He did a good deal of his
copying himself, and also employed two clerks in the same kind of
work.[244]

[Footnote 244: An excellent facsimile of Hauk's handwriting is
given in Rafn, tab. iii., lower part; tab. iv. and the upper
part of tab. iii. are in the hands of his two amanuenses. See
Vigfusson, _op. cit._ p. clxi.]

[Sidenote: The story is not likely to have been preserved to Hauk's time
by oral tradition only.]

Now I do not suppose it will occur to any rational being to suggest that
Hauk may have written down his version of Eric the Red's Saga from an
oral tradition nearly three centuries old. The narrative could not have
been so long preserved in its integrity, with so little extravagance of
statement and so many marks of truthfulness in details foreign to
ordinary Icelandic experience, if it had been entrusted to oral
tradition alone. One might as well try to imagine Drake's "World
Encompassed" handed down by oral tradition from the days of Queen
Elizabeth to the days of Queen Victoria. Such transmission is possible
enough with heroic poems and folk-tales, which deal with a few dramatic
situations and a stock of mythical conceptions familiar at every
fireside; but in a simple matter-of-fact record of sailors' observations
and experiences on a strange coast, oral tradition would not be long in
distorting and jumbling the details into a result quite undecipherable.
The story of the Zeno brothers, presently to be cited, shows what
strange perversions occur, even in written tradition, when the copyist,
instead of faithfully copying records of unfamiliar events, tries to
edit and amend them. One cannot reasonably doubt that Hauk's vellum of
Eric the Red's Saga, with its many ear-marks of truth above mentioned,
was copied by him--and quite carefully and faithfully withal--from some
older vellum not now forthcoming.

[Sidenote: