The Vinland Sagas

While it was highly impressive to learn about the great seafaring skills displayed by numerous voyages into uncharted territory that these Vikings bravely made, what I found most noteworthy about these two sagas was how each compared to one another. They seemed to me to be the same tale simply highlighting the adventures of different characters for the most part. Though, while many of the descriptions and characters appeared in both sagas, there were noticeable differences in the telling of this story of North American discovery. One example of this is in the simple event described where Eirik is riding down to join Leif on his journey and is injured. In The Saga of the Greenlanders, Eirik injures his foot in the fall and interprets this as a sign that he should not embark on the voyage, sending his son off alone. In Eirik the Red's Saga, Eirik hurts his ribs and shoulder which signifies that hiding away some of his wealth while he is gone was a poor idea and so he tells his wife to remove it from the hiding place and leaves on the journey to Vinland nevertheless. Another noteworthy discrepancy is in the portrayal of Freydis. While she is certainly described as being strong-willed and harshly critical in both tellings, The Saga of the Greenlanders portrays her as a much more manipulative, demanding, and overbearing than in Eirik the Red's Saga.
While these discrepancies may seem miniscule and insignificant, there are certainly enough of them to inspire curiosity about the way sagas are written down and how reliable they are as historical insights. Can the discrepancies simply be chalked up to translational errors or were there simply many versions of the same story circulating? To me, it seems that the Vinland Sagas just goes to show how one story, because of various versions in the oral tradition, can take such different forms. Because of the oral tradition in the culture, it seems that stories must have evolved through time, perhaps become more extravagant or had more influence from Christianity. These are only two of the versions and it is stated in the introduction that there were several others both preceding and following these two. It makes you wonder how different those versions might be from the two in this book. Would they differentiate significantly more the further they are from the original chronologically? What other sagas have we read that have other versions that might differ noticeably from those we are now familiar with?