gen, 1820.]

[Sidenote: Ari Frodhi.]

With the celebrated Ari Thorgilsson, usually known as Frodhi, "the
learned," we come to testimony nearly contemporaneous in time and
extremely valuable in character. This erudite priest, born in 1067, was
the founder of historical writing in Iceland. He was the principal
author of the "Landnama-bok," already mentioned as a work of thorough
and painstaking research unequalled in mediaeval literature. His other
principal works were the "Konunga-bok," or chronicle of the kings of
Norway, and the "Islendinga-bok," or description of Iceland.[247] Ari's
books, written not in monkish Latin, but in a good vigorous vernacular,
were a mine of information from which all subsequent Icelandic
historians were accustomed to draw such treasures as they needed. To his
diligence and acumen they were all, from Snorro Sturlason down, very
much indebted. He may be said to have given the tone to history-writing
in Iceland, and it was a high tone.

[Footnote 247: For a critical estimate of Ari's literary
activity and the extent of his work, the reader is referred to
Moebius, _Are's Islaenderbuch_, Leipsic, 1869; Maurer, "Ueber Ari
Thorgilsson und sein Islaenderbuch," in _Germania_, xv.; Olsen,
_Ari Thorgilsson hinn Frodhi_, Reykjavik, 1889, pp. 214-240.]

[Sidenote: Ari's significant allusion to Vinland.]

Unfortunately Ari's Islendinga-bok has perished. One cannot help
suspecting that it may have contained the contemporary materials from
which Eric the Red's Saga in the Hauks-bok was ultimately drawn. For
Ari made an abridgment or epitome of his great book, and this epitome,
commonly known as "Libellus Islandorum," still survives. In it Ari makes
brief mention of Greenland, and refers to his paternal uncle, Thorkell
Gellison, as authority for his statements. This Thorkell Gellison, of
Helgafell, a man of high consideration who flourished about the middle
of the eleventh century, had visited Greenland and talked with one of
the men who accompanied Eric when he went to settle in Brattahlid in
986. From this source Ari gives us the interesting information that
Eric's party found in Greenland "traces of human habitations, fragments
of boats, and stone implements; so from this one might conclude that
people of the kind who inhabited Vinland and were known by the (Norse)
Greenlanders as Skraelings must have roamed about there."[248] Observe
the force of this al