NORTHERN AUTHORITIES 



Bremen already had giants (Cyclopes) on an island in the North, 

 and we have seen that there were similar conceptions in the 

 "Historia Norvegiae " (cf. p. i6 f.). 



A mediaeval Icelandic tale (inserted in Bjorn Jonsson's 

 " Greenland Annals ") says of Halli Geit that 



"he alone succeeded in coming by land on foot over mountains and glaciers 

 and all the wastes, and past all the gulfs of the sea to Gandvik and then to 

 Norway. He led with him a goat, and lived on its milk; he often found val- 

 leys and narrow openings between the glaciers, so that the goats could feed 

 either on grass or in the woods." 



Ideas of this kind led to the view, held by some, that there 

 was land as far as the North Pole, which appears in an 



[From the Bayeux tapestry, eleventh century] 



Icelandic tract, included in the " Rymbegla " [1780, p. 466]. 

 Of a bad Latin verse, there reproduced, it is said: 



" Some will understand this to mean that he [i.e., the poet] says that land 

 lies under leidarstjarna [the pole-star], and that the shores there prevent the 

 ring of the ocean from joining [i.e., around the disc of the earth]; with this 

 certain ancient legends agree, which show that one can go, or that men have 

 gone, on foot from Greenland to Norway." 



But the mediaeval learned idea of the outer ocean sur- 

 rounding the whole disc of earth also asserts itself in the 

 North, and appears in Snorre's " Heimskringla " and in the 

 *' King's Mirror," among other works. This ocean went 

 outside Greenland, which was connected with Europe, and 

 made the former into a peninsula. In the work already 

 referred to, " Gripla " (only known in a late MS. in Bjorn 

 Jonsson of Skardsa, first half of the seventeenth century), 

 we read, in continuation of the passage already quoted (p. 35): 

 " Between Wineland and Greenland is Ginnungagap, it proceeds 

 from the sea that is called ' Mare oceanum,' which surrounds 

 the whole world." Since Wineland (i.e., the Insulas Fortu- 

 natae), as already stated, was by some, evidently through a 



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