IN NORTHERN MISTS 



of those embellishments which were often used in speaking of 

 the most distant regions. 



Saxo Grammaticus (first part of the thirteenth century) in 

 the preface to his Danish history gives geographical information 

 about Scandinavia and Iceland, to which we have already re- 

 ferred several times. He does not mention Greenland. He says 

 himself that he has made use of Icelandic literature to a large 

 extent; but he has also mingled with it a good deal of mythical 

 material from elsewhere. 



Beyond comparison the most important geographical 

 writer of the mediaeval North, and at the same time one of 

 the first in the whole of mediaeval Europe, was the unknown 

 author who wrote the " King's Mirror," ^ probably about 

 the middle of the thirteenth century.- If one turns from 

 contemporary or earlier European geographical literature, 

 with all its superstition and obscurity, to this masterly work, 

 the difference is very striking. Even at the first appearance 



1 The name of the work (" Konungs-Skuggsja " or " Speculum Regale ") 

 had its prototype in the names of those books which were written in India for 

 the education of princes, and which were called " Princes' Mirrors." In imita- 

 tion of these, " mirror " (" speculum ") was used as the title of works of 

 various kinds in mediaeval Europe. 



- Various guesses have been made as to who the author may have been 

 and when the work was written. It appears to me that there is much to be 

 said for the opinion put forward by A. V. Heffermehl (1904), that the author 

 may have been the priest Ivar Bodde, Hakon Hakonsson's foster-father. In 

 that case the work must have been written somewhat earlier than commonly 

 supposed (Storm put it between 1250 and 1260), and it appears that Heffer- 

 mehl has given good reasons for assuming that it may have been written 

 several years before 1250. Considerable weight as regards the determination 

 of its date must be attached to the circumstance that, in the opinion of Pro- 

 fessor Marius Haegstad, a vellum sheet preserved at Copenhagen (new royal 

 collection, No. 235g) has linguistic forms which must place it certainly before 

 1250, and the vellum must have belonged to a copy of an older MS. On the 

 other hand. Professor Moltke Moe has pointed out in his lectures that the 

 quotations in the " King's Mirror " from the book of the Marvels of India, 

 from Prester John's letter, are derived from a version of the latter which, as 

 shown by Zarncke, is not known before about 1300. Moltke Moe therefore 

 supposes that the " King's Mirror," in the form we know it, may be a later and 

 incomplete adaptation of the original work. The latter may have been 

 written by Ivar Bodde in his old age, between 1230 and 1240. 

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