It is not surprising that a name like "Vínland hit Góða" should have developed from such a world of ideas as this. But Moltke Moe has drawn my attention to yet another remarkable agreement, in the Grape-Island ("Insula Uvarum"), one of the fortunate isles visited by the Irish saint Brandan. In the Latin "Navigatio Sancti Brandani"--a description of Brandan's seven years' sea voyage in search of the "Promised Land"--it is related that one day a mighty bird came flying to Brandan and the brethren who were with him in the coracle; it had a branch in its beak with a bunch of grapes of unexampled size and redness[343] [cf. Numbers xiii. 23],[344] and it dropped the branch into the lap of the man of God. The grapes were as large as apples, and they lived on them for twelve days.
"Three days afterwards they reached the island; it was covered with the thickest forests of vines, which bore grapes with such incredible fertility that all the trees were bent to the earth; all with the same fruit and the same colour; not a tree was unfruitful, and there were none found there of any other sort."
Then this man of God goes ashore and explores the island, while the brethren wait in the boat (like Karlsevne and his men waiting for the runners), until he comes back to them bringing samples of the fruits of the island (as the runners brought with them samples of the products of Wineland). He says: "Come ashore and set up the tent, and regale yourselves with the excellent fruits of this land, which the Lord has shown us." For forty days they lived well on the grapes, and when they left they loaded the boat with as many of them as it would hold, exactly like Leif in the "Grönlendinga-þáttr," who loaded the ship's boat with grapes when they left Wineland; and like Thorvald at the same place, who collected grapes and vines for a cargo [cf. "Grönl. hist. Mind.," i. pp. 222, 230].
[Sidenote: The river at Hóp and the Styx]
The fortunate island on which the monk Mernoc lived (at the beginning of the "Navigatio") was called "Insula Deliciosa." The great river that Brandan found in the Terra Repromissionis, and that ran through the middle of the island, may be compared to the stream that Karlsevne found at Hóp in Wineland, which fell into a lake and thence into the sea, and where they entered the mouth of the river. But the river which divided the Terra Repromissionis, and which Brandan could not cross, was evidently originally the river of death, Styx or Acheron in Greek mythology ("Gjǫll" in Norse mythology). One might be tempted to suppose that, in the same way as the whole description of Wineland has been dechristianised from the Terra Repromissionis, the realistic, and therefore often rationalising, Icelanders have transformed the river in the Promised Land, the ancient river of death, into the stream at Hóp.
