VOYAGES IN THE POLAR SEA 



opinion that there is a whirlpool in this current or immediately outside it"; 

 and "when the stream is strongest, one can see the sun and the sky through 

 the waves, since they go as high as other high mountains." ^ 



Peder Clausson Friis gives a similarly exaggerated descrip- 

 tion of the current (circa 1613), sometimes using the same ex- 

 pressions as the authors quoted. The resemblance between 

 these various descriptions is so great that it cannot easily be 

 explained merely by their reporting the same oral tradition; 

 what they have in common must rather be derived from an older 

 written source (Nicholas of L5mn?), which again has adopted 

 ancient mythical conceptions. It is strange how few more recent 

 ideas have been added even in Schonnebol, who was sheriff of 

 Lofoten and Vesteralen for at least twenty years (from 1570), 

 and must have had plenty of opportunity for gathering informa- 

 tion on the spot; but it is the usual experience that everything 

 that could be got from old books was preferred. That stories of 

 the Moskenstrom may have been known in Adam of Bremen's 

 time is highly probable, perhaps even Paulus Warnefridi had 

 heard of it (cf. Vol. I, p. 158). 



When we have shorn Adam's tale of all borrowed features, 

 is there enough left to make it possible that the Norwegian 

 king Harold undertook a voyage out into the ocean? It is 

 not easy to form a definite opinion on this, but the proba- 

 bility must be that King Svein of the Danes told some such 

 story, which was then adorned by Magister Adam. As the voy- 

 age was supposed to have taken place recently, it must be Har- 

 old Hardrade who was intended, otherwise one might be led to 

 think of Harold Grafeld's celebrated voyage to Bjarmeland.^ 



1 Cf. Storm, 1895, pp. 190 f. 



2 It is not impossible that it was of this Norwegian king Harold's voyage 

 that Adam heard from the Danes; in that case he may readily be supposed to 

 have made a mistake and connected it with the King Harold who was then 

 living, to whom he also attributes a voyage in the Baltic; it is a common expe- 

 rience that many similar incidents in which different persons were engaged 

 collect about one of them. The circumstance that Harold is here mentioned 

 without any term of abuse, with which Adam is elsewhere in the habit of ac- 

 companying any mention of him, is perhaps, as already said (Vol. I, p. 195, 

 note), of no particular significance. Harold Grafeld was much in Denmark, 



