the women, who waited on the
men, and at great feasts, such as Gunnar's wedding, the wives of his
nearest kinsmen, and of his dearest friend, Thorhillda Skaldtongue,
Thrain's wife, and Bergthora, Njal's wife, went about from board to
board waiting on the guests.

In everyday life they were a simple sober people, early to bed and early
to rise--ever struggling with the rigour of the climate. On great
occasions, as at the Yule feasts in honour of the gods, held at the
temples, or at "arvel," "heir-ale," feasts, when heirs drank themselves
into their father's land and goods, or at the autumn feasts, which
friends and kinsmen gave to one another, there was no doubt great mirth
and jollity, much eating and hard drinking of mead and fresh-brewed ale;
but these drinks are not of a very heady kind, and one glass of spirits
in our days would send a man farther on the road to drunkenness than
many a horn of foaming mead. They were by no means that race of
drunkards and hard livers which some have seen fit to call them.

Nor were these people such barbarians as some have fancied, to whom it
is easier to rob a whole people of its character by a single word than
to take the pains to inquire into its history. They were bold warriors
and bolder sailors. The voyage between Iceland and Norway, or Iceland
and Orkney, was reckoned as nothing; but from the west firths of
Iceland, Eric the Red--no ruffian as he has been styled, though he had
committed an act of manslaughter--discovered Greenland; and from
Greenland the hardy seafarers pushed on across the main, till they made
the dreary coast of Labrador. Down that they ran until they came at last
to Vineland the good, which took its name from the grapes that grew
there. From the accounts given of the length of the days in that land,
it is now the opinion of those best fitted to judge on such matters,
that this Vineland was no other than some part of the North American
continent near Rhode Island or Massachusetts, in the United States.
Their ships were half-decked, high out of the water at stem and stern,
low in the waist, that the oars might reach the water, for they were
made for rowing as well as for sailing. The after-part had a poop. The
fore-part seems to have been without deck, but loose planks were laid
there for men to stand on. A distinction was made between long-ships or
ships of war, made long for speed, and ... ships of burden, which were
built to carry cargo. The common comp