the early-twelfth-century Book of the Icelanders says that when the Norsemen first began to settle Iceland around 870, they found priests already living there, but the priests refused to live with heathens and they went away, leaving ‘Irish books and bells and croziers from which one could know that they were Irishmen’.23 So for all Dicuil’s other stories of men born with horse’s feet, others with ears large enough to cover their whole bodies, and elks whose upper lip hangs down so much they can eat only if they walk backwards, not to mention the difficulty of trapping unicorns because they
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