Nearly five hundred years before Christopher Columbus set forth across the Atlantic, Norse people colonized Iceland and then Greenland. According to the two works included here, the Graenlendiga Saga and Eirik's Saga, they went further, and settled, if briefly, a territory called Vinland that lay beyond Greenland. This can only have been North America, but for centuries doubt was poured on the Norse achievement, and the sagas dismissed as legends. Archaeology has now proved that the Norse did settle in North America, but the location of Vinland proves elusive. This is partly due to contradictions in the sagas, both of which are works of literature, not history. And the translators here, Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, had come to believe that Vinland as described in the sagas was in any case a fabulous literary construct.

The two sagas are both short and easily read. Vinland occupies a small part of the accounts, which are as much about the settlement of Greenland and the family of Eirik the Red as about the discovery of Vinland. A reader used to more plot driven works may find both sagas annoyingly episodic. But this is the literary form of the sagas, and the introduction provides an engaging guide to the Vinland question as it stood in the mid-1960s, when this translation was first published. In a 2003 postscript tribute is paid to the late Hermann Palsson by his collaborator Magnusson, who himself died earlier this year.

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