That Entirely Accidental Incident Is The Earliest Geographical
Discovery Made By The Modern Nations, Of Which Any Authentic Record Now
Remains, And Was Almost The Only Instance Of The Kind Which Occurred, From
The Commencement Of The Decline Of The Roman Power, Soon After The
Christian Era, For Nearly Fourteen Centuries.
And as the colonization of
Iceland did not begin till A.D. 878, the insertion of this circumstance in
the present place, can hardly be considered as at all deviating from the
most rigid principles of our plan.
SECTION I
Discovery of Iceland by the Norwegians in the Ninth Century[1].
It were foreign to our present object to attempt any delineation of the
piratical, and even frequently conquering expeditions of the various
nations of Scandinavia, who, under the names of Angles, Saxons, Jutes,
Danes, and Normans, so long harassed the fragments of the Roman empire.
About the year 861, one Naddod, a Nordman or Norwegian vikingr, or chief of
a band of freebooters, who, during a voyage to the Faro islands, was thrown
by a storm upon the eastern coast of an unknown country, considerably
beyond the ordinary course of navigation, to which he gave the significant
name of Snio-land, or Snow-land, from the immense quantities of snow which
every where covered its numerous lofty mountains, even in the height of
summer, and filled its many valleys during a long and dreary winter. As
Naddod gave a rather favourable account of his discovery on his return to
Norway, one Gardar Suafarson, of Swedish origin, who was settled in Norway,
determined upon making an expedition to Snow-land in 864; and having
circumnavigated the whole extent of this new discovery, he named it from
himself, Gardars-holm, or Gardars-island.
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