IN NORTHERN MISTS 



It is clear that " Africanae Insulae " is here used directly 

 as a name instead of Wineland, in connection with Markland 

 and Helluland, as in the Icelandic geography. But the 

 African Islands (i.e. originally the Canary Islands) were in 



fact the Insulse 

 Fortunatae, in 

 connection with 

 the Gorgades and 

 the Hesperides ; 

 and thus we have 

 here a direct proof 

 that they were 

 looked upon as the 

 same. 



G. Storm [1890] and 

 A. A. Bjornbo [1909, 

 pp. 229, f.] have sought 

 to explain the connec- 

 tion of Wineland with 

 Africa as an attempt on 

 the part of the Ice- 

 landic geographers to 

 unite new discoveries 

 of western lands with 

 the classical-mediaeval 

 conceptions of the continents as a continuous disk of earth with an outer sur- 

 rounding ocean. But even if such " learned " ideas prevailed in Iceland and 

 Norway [cf. the " King's Mirror"], it would nevertheless be unnatural to unite 

 Africa and Wineland, which lay near Hvitramanna-land, six days' sail west of 

 Ireland, unless there were other grounds for doing so. Although agreeing on 

 the main point, Dr. Bjornbo maintains (in a letter to me) that the Icelanders 

 may have got their continental conception from Isidore himself, who asserted 

 the dogma of the threefold division of the continental circle; and the question 

 whether Wineland was African or not depended upon whether it came south 

 or north of the line running east and west through the Mediterranean. But 

 the same Isidore also described the Insulae Fortunatae and other countries as 

 islands in the ocean, and his dogma could not thus have hindered Wineland 

 from being regarded as an island like other islands [cf. Adam of Bremen's 

 islands], but why then precisely African? Besides, the Icelandic geography 

 and the " Historia Norvegiae " represents two different conceptions, one as a 

 2 



The conception of the northern and western lands 

 and islands in Norse literature 



