Entombed in an lcebé for a Thousand Years The Startling Discovéry Which Came When the Grand Floe Drifted Ashore and Revealed a Picturesque Viking, Perfectly Preserved, Even to His Winged Helmet, the uncharted seas north of the Arctic Circle, traversing heaven knows how many thousand miles of snow and silence, perhaps pushed by the ever- grinding ice-floes to the North Pole itself, the body of 4 Viking king a thousard years old has been returned at last to civillza- tion. Encabed from nead to heel in a frozen winding sheet that preserved it more per- fectly than any #®gyptian mummy, the Viking's body was discovered by Danish doctors standing upright in a huge iceberg cast up on the east coast of Greenland. It towered before their amazed eyes like an incredible phantom--seven feet tall, clad In rude ancient armor, gripping spear and shield, head crowned with the winged helmet of Norse royalty, the whole dimly visible within the transoarent tomb of ice. Men with axes chopped away this datural casket. Then the Viking stood as un- marred by time as though he had died but yesterday. He was not dried or shrunken. The skin was white and firm. The hale of the head and the bushy mustache was long and red and silky. The iceberg had kept him imperishable for posterity. The body is being taken on a ship to Copenhagen. There scientists will en- deavor to perpetuate the process of preser- vation by the injection of chemicals. If they are successful, the body of the Viking D5 for ten centuries through Armor and Red Hair < The Celebrated Painting of Wotan and Brunhilde--Characters in he Colelua and anting Mythology--Showing Winged Helmet fing In the Copenhagen museum will be the most remarkable relic on earth. Millions will come to stare at the Norse- man who lived and loved and fought a 0. Eh scholars impatiently val of the extraordinary have dispatched an expedition Greenland to continue excavations. has reached them that seven more pl ay give science the most val has ever had on Bo Nascuen wd voyages. The ea 'history ol ca «may be rewritten before the in- yestigators through. Already ey oy ulilering a theory and Armor Like That the Vikings Wore. that the Viking with his royal helmet may be no less a celebrity than Lief Eriksen," "Erik the Red," famed in saga and rune as a dauntless voyager, be Heved by many historians (who base their assumption on authentic findings) to have landed on the shores of America four hundred years before Columbus steered the "Santa Maria" into harbor at San Sak vador. "Erik the Red," according to Norse legend, was an earl banished to Green- land because of his secret romance with his liege lord's beautiful daughter. He was a great fighter, a great lover, a great . adventuref., After settling at Brattelid and building seventeen dwellings (founda- tions of which were unearthed a few years ago), he heard from his uacle, Bjarni, a noted navigator, of a vast new land to the southwest. Erik followed the lure of the un- known. By the account of his voy- age preserved in Norse story, his- torians judge that he finally reached what is now Cape Cod Bay, sailed Reproduced from a Painting of a sailed back to Greenland. There he died -- violently, as became a king. The old sagas tell how he and his fellow chieftains pledged their last "skoal" in foamtng horns of mead before they roared forth to battle against an alien invader But, before the ralder was driven into the sea, his archers and spear- men slew "Erik the Red" and many of his warriors. They buried Erik, according to Viking custom, in full armor. His helmet, with its twin wifigs and its gold encrusted lin- ing, was upon his head His shield was buckled on his arm and his Javelin was in his hand, that he might be fit to sit with the high gods. Buried with him were Viking Warship of the Type in Which Lief Erikson Set Sail About 900 A.D. along Scituate Beach past Coronet Rock into Boston harbor, and thence up the Charles River into the Back Bay, where he landed near Cam- bridge and built a large house. The archaeologists have found to confirm this legend ruins of various dwellings, fish pits, canals, bowls, stone sinkers for salmon fishing, a marble cup, all of unmistakable sNorse origin. The family of Eben Norton Horsford, on whose property these tokens were unearthed, erected a statue of Lief Eriksen in Faneuil Hall, Boston. "Erik the Red" left a small colony of Vikings In the new world and Conyrieht: 1977 '= Infeatomal Feature Service. Ine. Great Britain Rights Reserved, those of his companions who had fallen in' battle. But the earth was not their grave. They placed the body of Erik and those pther bodies in galleys. They rowed out to the ice floes grinding past the Greenland coast. In niches carved deep into the ice they laid the dead Vikings; then watched them disappear--slowly, majestically--into the red eye of the sunset on their long journey to Valhalla. Thus, eing the old sagas, passed "Erik the Red" in the year 922 A. D. or there abouts. Now, a thousand years later, the ice mountains of the Arctic have given up their secret of the centuries. Years passed. In the steady, ceaseless grind of the floes immense chunks, mountain tall, were broken off, to become icebergs at the mercy of ocean currents. By what freak of ocean wind and tide the iceberg containing these eight bodies was brought to that particular spot on the Greenland coast, only Providence knows, But eventually--possibly after completely circumnavigating Greenland--it was thrust ap by the waves onto a ¥ promontory on the southeastern sea: Here the iceberg may rested years before a numan beingled that way, Even did some lonely } Ome upon ft he might have misseqaadies buried in its side. Only graddid the'iceberg melt under the actiofun and wind, until the helmeted c¥ Was visible for the first time irdOusand years, through the thin shedbrough a win. dow. The @iscovery of Vikings by the ° Danes came about 8h an unusual chain of circumstanc®™ many months Eskimos, coming int#©ttlements, had brought ghostly tale SPectre-haunted point on the lonely 92st. Put white men paid little att! 10 the stories, They were used to Suberstitions in the frozen, Northf1d8 of beach. walkers and dune-h®; Of the ghastly "Yoe-Hoes" that statrails of hunters; of the phantom er{ lost ships heard In the night whidfot singing, but whistling--tor thePf the man who steered them to th This rumor of a fair-skinned, red Slant staring out of the side of an® Seemed but an- other yarn, 3 Then, at the I Mines at Ivigtut, an epidemic of | Proke out. The Danish Governm# 2. party of physi. cians to the towf" heard the story of the phentom the iceberg, and the more advenfPIrits of the party proposed an exg The young dt Out more in fun than in earnest Pelieved they wer stalking a ghd} Sulded by Ee , mos, they stuff the end of th- journey on th .the century--the Viking king, #8 for a thousand years, released® iCY casket by their swiftly choppi es for the first time since he set rif 2halla in the dawn of the tenth Bods that rivals tne strange discos A Hetion can any. ¢ n a nova thing similar' hie Fraser id #8 South Pole expedi. Who was found frozen 89 was thawed back 1o murder on the high ally refrozen and ra. Anish main might be ¥ hand. >