IN NORTHERN MISTS 



Dvina) made a campaign against the Norwegians. A com- 

 plaint from Norway of 1420 shows that the attack was directed 

 against northern Halogaland, without informing us whether 

 it was made by land or by sea. Some years later, in 1419, the 

 Norwegians made a campaign of reprisal and came 



" with an army of 500 men in trading vessels and sloops and ravaged the Kare- 

 lian district about the Varzuga [on the Kola peninsula on the north side of 

 the White Sea] and many parishes in Savolotchie [on the Dvina], amongst 

 others St. Nikolai [at the mouth of the Dvina], Kigo and Kiaro [in the Gulf 

 of Onega], and others. They burned three churches and cut down Christians 

 and monks, but the Savolotchians sank two Norwegian sloops, and the rest 

 fled across the sea." 1 " In 1444 the Karelians went with an army against the 

 Norwegians, and fought with them, and in 1445 the Norv/egians came with 

 an army to the Dvina, ravaged Nenoksa [in the gulf off the mouth of the 

 Dvina] with fire and sword, killed some and carried off others as prisoners; 

 but the inhabitants on the Dvina hastened after them, cut down their ' voivods ' 

 [leaders, chiefs] Ivar and Peter, and captured forty men who were sent to 

 Novgorod." 1 



This will be sufficient to show that the White Sea voyage 

 remained familiar in Norway. This communication increased 

 about the beginning of the sixteenth century, and this had a de- 

 cisive influence on the so-called rediscovery of the White Sea by 

 the English. 



In reading Ottar's narrative and the earliest Norse accounts 

 of voyages to Bjarmeland it must strike us that the Bjarmas 

 we hear about seem to have possessed a surprisingly high 

 degree of culture. As Professor Olaf Broch has also pointed 

 out to me, this may be an indication that a comparatively 

 active communication had existed long before that time along 

 the Dvina and the Volga between the people of the White 

 Sea and those on the Caspian and the Black Sea (by transport 

 from the Volga to the Don). In those early times, before the 

 Russians had yet established themselves in the territory of the 

 upper Volga, this communication may have passed to the east 

 of the Slavs through Finnish-speaking peoples the whole way 

 from the lower Volga and the Finnish Bulgarians (cf. the Mord- 

 vin tribes of to-day). 



1 The Russian chronicles in translation, " Suomi " for 1848. 

 142 



