IN NORTHERN MISTS 



And in a later passage we read: 



" The fourth part [of Norway] is Halogia, whose inhabitants live in great 

 measure with the Finns [Lapps], and trade with them; this land forms the 

 boundary of Norway on the north as far as the place called Wegestaf, which 

 divides it from Bjarmeland [* Biarmonia '] ; there is the very deep and north- 

 erly gulf which has in it Charybdis, Scylla, and unavoidable whirlpools; there 

 are also ice-covered promontories which plunge into the sea immense masses 

 of ice that have been increased by heaving floods and are frozen together by 

 the winter cold; with these traders often collide against their will, when making 

 for Greenland, and thus they suffer shipwreck and run into danger." 



It may seem probable that the description of a country in 

 the north referred to Svalbard; and the naive allusion to 

 glacier-ice plunging from the land is most likely to be derived 

 from voyagers to the Polar Sea; for it seems less probable 

 that it should be merely information about Greenland transferred 

 to the North. Storm, it is true, dated the " Historia Norvegiae," 

 between 1180 and 1190, that is, before the discovery of Svalbard 

 according to the annals; but later writers place it in the 

 thirteenth century, even as late as the year 1260. The 

 ideas of the people of great size and of the Land of Virgins 

 are obviously taken from Adam of Bremen, and may be a 

 literary ornament. 



There have been different opinions as to what country 

 Svalbard was. Many have thought that it might be the 

 northern east coast of Greenland; Jan Mayen has also been 

 mentioned; while others, like S. Thorlacius, a hundred 

 years ago (1808), supposed that it was "the Siberian coasts 

 of the Arctic Ocean, lying to the east of Permia [Bjarmeland], 

 that the ancient Norsemen included under the name of Svalbard, 

 i.e., the cold coast." Gustav Storm [1890, p. 344] maintained 

 that Svalbard in all probability must be Spitzbergen,^ and 

 many reasons point to the correctness of this supposition. 



No certain conclusion can be drawn about Svalbard from 

 the passage quoted from the Landnamabok. " On the north 

 in Hafsbotn," must mean in some northerly direction; for 

 it is only the chief points of the compass, north, south, and 



1 Cf. also A. Bugge, 1898, p. 499; G. Isachsen, 1907. 

 168 



