Aside from such things as picking grapes in the spring, sipping sweet dew from the grass, and the presence of an apparition, the Flat Island Book account, when read by itself, with no attempt to make it harmonize with the statements of the "Saga of Eric the Red" or other facts of Scandinavian history, is a sufficiently straightforward narrative. The difficulty begins when it is placed in juxtaposition to these facts and statements. It should not be and need not be discarded, but in giving an account of the Vinland voyages it must be used with circumspection. From an historical standpoint it must occupy a subordinate place. If Rafn in his _Antiquitates Americanæ_ had given emphatic precedence to the saga as found in Hauk's Book and AM. 557, had left to American scholars the Dighton Rock and the Newport Tower, and had not been so confident in the matter of identifying the exact localities that the explorers visited, he might have carried conviction, instead of bringing confusion, to American scholars.
The general results of the work of the Norwegian scholar Dr. Storm, together with a unique presentation of the original narratives, are accessible in _The Finding of Wineland_ (London, 1890 and 1895), by an American scholar, the late Arthur Middleton Reeves. This work contains a lucid account of the important investigations on the subject, photographs of all the vellum pages that give the various narratives, a printed text accompanying these, page by page and line by line, and also translations into English. There is one phase of the subject that this work does not discuss: the identifications of the regions visited by the Northmen. Dr. Storm, however, has gone into this subject, and is convinced that Helluland, Markland, and Vinland of the sagas, are Labrador, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia.[10-1] The sailing directions in the "Saga of Eric the Red" are given with surprising detail. These, with other observations, seem to fit Nova Scotia remarkably well. Only one thing appears to speak against Storm's view, and that is the _abundance_ of grapes to which the Flat Island Book account testifies. But coupled with this testimony are statements (to say nothing of the unreliability of this saga in other respects) that indicate that the Icelandic narrators had come to believe that grapes were gathered in the spring, thus invalidating the testimony as to abundance.