Talk:Saga of the Greenlanders

1 in contents list
For the first item, there is an ugly 1 in the title because of the footnote. Is there a way of getting rid of the 1 without removing the footnote? It appears as "1.1 Colonization of Greenland1" on the TOC. --Naelphin 02:21, 29 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Good point, I hadn't noticed this. Trying a few things with preview doesn't yield a solution. - Haukur 02:45, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Grœnlendinga þáttr
What is this þáttr, or is it just another name for the saga? Stefán Ingi 01:31, 26 December 2005 (UTC)


 * No, it's a completely different thing - you can read it here.


 * The terminology is very confusing - both of those pieces of prose are about the same length and both of them are found only in Flateyjarbók. In fact Grœnlendinga saga is something of an artificial construct. It's a narrative combined from two disjoint chapters of Flateyjarbók (plus a small third piece) which have the manuscript titles Grœnlendinga þáttr and Eiríks þáttr rauða. But the thing which we now call Grœnlendinga þáttr is also called Grœnlendinga þáttr in the manuscript. The table of contents at Flateyjarbók is misleading - within Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar are some þættir. - Haukur 01:42, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Page location - Google searches
I fooled around with Google a bit. Both Britannica and Encarta use Tale of the Greenlanders to refer to this saga but I think that's an awful title since it could also apply to "Grœnlendinga þáttr" - which is why I made a disambiguation page. (I aim to include some information on the confused terminology here in the article itself.)

google.com

 * 906 English pages for "Greenlanders' Saga" -Wikipedia
 * 586 English pages for "Grœnlendinga saga" | "Grænlendinga saga" | "Groenlendinga saga" | "Granlendinga saga" | "Grenlendinga saga" | "Graenlendinga saga" -Wikipedia
 * 525 English pages for "Tale of the Greenlanders" -Wikipedia (including Britannica and Encarta)
 * 297 English pages for "Greenlander Saga" -Wikipedia
 * 238 English pages for "Saga of the Greenlanders" -Wikipedia

books.google.com

 * 39 pages on "Greenlanders' Saga"
 * 26 pages on "Saga of the Greenlanders"
 * 18 pages on "Grœnlendinga saga" OR "Grænlendinga saga" OR "Groenlendinga saga" OR "Granlendinga saga" OR "Grenlendinga saga" OR "Graenlendinga saga".
 * 11 pages on "Greenlander Saga"
 * 7 pages on "Tale of the Greenlanders"

It seems that Greenlanders' Saga may be the most common title for the story in English texts (though these numbers obviously aren't conclusive). That's an acceptable non-confusing title so I wouldn't mind a move there. - Haukur 23:52, 27 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I get 834 and 8, as results for "Greenland Saga", which is more natural in English, and should also be considered. (Presumably the naturalness is why it occurs despite the imprecise translation.) My only reservation about "Greenlanders' Saga" is the hyphen - and it will need a redirect from "Greenlander's Saga". Experto crede. Septentrionalis 23:14, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Sigh, okay, I guess :) The spelling with the incorrectly placed apostrophe actually had an incoming link when I started writing this so a redirect is probably necessary. I'll add the Greenland Saga option to the mix. - Haukur 23:17, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Wait a moment! Now I actually get far fewer hits for "Greenlanders' Saga" than last time I was doing this. Fickle Google. Or maybe I made a mistake originally. I'll rerun all searches - but it can wait till tomorrow. - Haukur 23:20, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Some further fiddling with Google shows that the apostrophe is frequently omitted or misplaced in Greenlanders' Saga so the theory that it is the most common title is cast into doubt. It's a clumsy title anyhow. It seems that Greenland Saga is the title of some Dungeons & Dragons publication. Bah. Of the English titles I'd prefer Saga of the Greenlanders as reasonably non-clumsy. I'm also starting to note that sometimes when the original titles (or scholarly titles or whatever you want to call them) are used in English texts the word Saga is capitalized. Thus Grœnlendinga Saga occurs in some English language works but Grœnlendinga saga in others.
 * It's probably not worth it spending so much time analyzing this, next time I'll work on the article instead :) - Haukur 00:33, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Article title
Although my knowledge of latin dipthongs is sketchy, I think it's supposed to be æ instead of œ in the article title. Awickert (talk) 00:54, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I finally looked into this, and I see both in use; the form of the sagas that I read used the æ, so that is what I was familiar with. Does anyone here know enough of Scandinavian languages to be able to tell us which one it is? For the moment I'm going to create a redirect and note the alternate spelling in the lede. Awickert (talk) 07:54, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Grœnlendinga saga is the normalized Old Norse spelling, Grænlendinga saga is the normalized modern Icelandic spelling. Haukur (talk) 10:35, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Well that explains it; thank you very much. I'll clarify in the text of the article. Awickert (talk) 16:47, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Reattributing quotes from Reeves tr. to Beamish
I googled the 3quotations in the article, and reattributed from "Reeves's translation" to "Beamish" (North Ludlow Beamish).

Googling showed quotes were not in Reeve's The Finding of Wineland the Good: The History of the Icelandic Discovery of America given. They were in Beamish (1841).

Sure, the very text was reprinted in Norse Discovery of America 1906 given as "Reeves et al.", but the book co-authored by Beamish also, so thinking it was "Reeves's translation" was an erroneous assumption. --Kiyoweap (talk) 11:02, 21 March 2013 (UTC)