[93] Considerable has been said at various times in opposition to these accounts, because cattle and sheep, and sometimes horses, are mentioned in connection with Greenland. Some have supposed that, for these reasons, the Saga must be incorrect. Yet, in more modern times, there has been nothing to prevent the people from keeping such animals, though it has been found better to substitute dogs for horses. Crantz says, that in "the year 1759, one of our missionaries brought three sheep with him from Denmark to New Herrnhuth. These have so increased by bringing some two, some three lambs a year, that they have been able to kill some every year since, to send some to Lichtenfels, for a beginning there, and, after all, to winter ten at present. We may judge how vastly sweet and nutritive the grass is here, from the following tokens: that tho' three lambs come from one ewe, they are larger, even in autumn, than a sheep of a year old in Germany." He says that in the summer they could pasture two hundred sheep around New Herrnhuth; and that they formerly kept cows, but that it proved too much trouble.--_History of Greenland_, vol. I, p. 74.
[94] He must have gone over to Greenland from Norway then, as in the year 1000, he returned and introduced Christianity into Greenland. The language used is indefinite.
[95] One recension of the Saga of Eric the Red, states that he went with Leif on his voyage to Vinland. Finn Magnusen says that the error arose from a change of one letter in a pair of short words. See _Grönland's Historiske Mindesmærker_, vol. I, p. 471.
[96] Horses could be kept in Greenland now, only with much expense. It appears that anciently it was not so. Undoubtedly there has been more or less of change in climate. Geologists find evidence that at one period, a highly tropical climate must have existed in the northern regions.
[97] Superstition was the bane of the Northman's life. He was also a firm believer in Fate. The doctrines of Fate held the finest Northern minds in a vice-like grasp, so that in many cases their lives were continually overshadowed by a great sorrow. One of the saddest illustrations of this belief, may be found in the _Saga of Grettir the Strong_ (given in Baring-Gould's work on Iceland), a Saga in which the doctrine appears with a power that is well nigh appalling.