Few men wrote or read in the olden days. Skalds, singers, learned songs from hearing them sung. At last people began to write more easily. Then they said:
"These stories are very precious. We must write them down to save them from being forgotten."
After that many men in Iceland spent their winters in writing books. They wrote on sheepskin; vellum, we call it. Many of these old vellum books have been saved for hundreds of years, and are now in museums. Some leaves are lost, some are torn, and are yellow and crumpled. But they are precious. They tell us all that we know about that olden time. There are the very words that the men of Iceland wrote so long ago stories of kings and of battles of ship sailing.
These stories have three values. The men, with the crude courage and the strange adventures that make a man interesting to children, have at the same time the love of truth, the hardy endurance, the faithfulness to the plighted word, that make them a child's fit companions. Hall deems it a great thing accomplished if the children who read these stories should be so tempted after a while to read those fine old books, to enjoy the tales, to appreciate straightforwardness and simplicity of style. The historical value of the story of Leif Ericsson and the others seems to be not to learn the fact that Norsemen discovered America before Columbus did, but to gain a conception of the conditions of early navigation, of the length of the voyage, of the dangers of the sea, and a consequent realization of the reason for the fact that America was unknown to mediaeval Europe, of why the Norsemen did not travel, and of what was necessary to be done before men should strike out across the ocean.
