Note 518 — Chapter II
Reading edition
It has sometimes been contended that a bull of Gregory IV, in a.d. 770, referred to Greenland, but Spitzbergen was more likely intended, though its known discovery is much later. A bull of a.d. 835, in Pontanus’s Rerum Daniarum Historia, is also held to indicate that there were earlier peoples in Greenland than those from Iceland. Sabin (vi. no. 22,854) gives as published at Godthaab, 1859-61, in 3 vols., the Eskimo text of Greenland Folk Lore, collected and edited by natives of Greenland, with a Danish translation, and showing, as the notice says, the traditions of the first descent of the Northmen in the eighth century.