Three additional Mi’kmaq names with woodland

elements are cited by Rayburn (1973) from Pacifique (1934)“8:

oaipogtog — ’grassy woods’; a name for the Montague River.

oaipogtot/g — ’grassy woods’; a name for the Cardigan River.

weibooktoojech — according to Pacifique (1934) this means ’little grassy woods’ (though Rand translates it as ’little red river’, which seems more likely). It is a name for the Boughton River.

2. Landscape descriptions in Viking sagas: do they apply to Prince Edward Island ?

Based on information contained in the Saga of the Greenlanders it has recently been suggested149 that Prince Edward Island may be the Vinland of that saga. There is no detailed description of the forest of Vinland

in the saga — only a reference to collecting wood. Otherwise the landscape description is limited to the following [the content of the parentheses are

Sigurdson’s]:

They sailed to wards an island, which lay to the north of the land [Prince Edward Island] where they went ashore [around East Point?]. In the fine weather they found dew on the grass . Afterwards they returned to their ship and sailed into the sound [Northumberland Strait?] which lay between the island and the headland which stretched out northwards from the land [Cape St. George]. They rounded the head/and and steered westward. Here there were extensive shallows at low tide and their ship was soon stranded and the sea looked far away to those aboard ship. Their curiosity to see the land was so great that they could not be bothered to wait for the tide to come in and float their stranded ship, and they ran ashore where a river f/o wed into the sea from a lake. There was no lack of salmon both in the lake and the river, and this salmon was larger than they had ever seen before. It seemed to them the land was so good, that livestock would need no fodder during the winter. The temperature never dropped below freezing and the grass only withered very slightly. [They collect grapes and load their ship with wood before returning to Greenland] and named the land for its natural features and called it Vin/and. 15°

14B

Paclfique (de Valiguy] (1934) Le Pays des Micmacs, Montreal, in Etudes Historiques et Géographiques (1942), Restigouche.

“9 Sigurdsson 1998.

15° From Sigurdsson (1998) who has taken it from Chapter 2 of the Saga of the Greenlanders, translated by Keneva Kunz, which is published in a complete five volume translation of the sagas: The Complete Sagas of the Icelanders: Including 49 Tales. (General

Editor: Vidar Hreinsson, Reykjavik, Leifur Eiriksson Publishing 1997).

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Sigurdsson argues that the sailing directions given in the saga would fit a landing on Prince Edward Island and that the above description could thus apply to the Island, though as he points out, it is not clear from the text whether they landed on the mainland or on the island mentioned, so the above description may not apply to an island at all. However, telling against the Prince Edward Island theory is the mild winter without freezing and the extensive tidal flats they encountered — both of these would better fit the Bay of Fundy. In the end, the evidence is inconclusive and is likely to remain so, unless there should be some startling archaeological discovery — which is unlikely. And anyway, from the point of view of early descriptions of the forests of Prince Edward Island it is of little consequence, as the saga contains no extensive forest descriptions.