NORTHERN AUTHORITIES 



Though in simple and everyday words, this really expresses 

 the idea that Greenland and the neighboring regions are dispro- 

 portionately cold, and that, in part at any rate, this is due to the 

 glaciers of Greenland, which have a refrigerating effect (as an 

 anticyclonic pole of maximum cold). This is, to a certain de- 

 gree, correct. In crossing Greenland, in 1888, we found that a 

 pole of cold (anticyclone) lies over the inland ice, which gives 

 off cold air. Scientific greatness does not always depend on eru- 

 dition or acute learned combinations ; it is just as often the result 

 of a sound common sense. 



The allusion in the *' King's Mirror " to the Norse inhabitants 

 of Greenland and their life has already been quoted in part (Vol. 

 I, p. 277 f.) ; curiously enough the Skraslings are not mentioned. 

 The author gives a graphic description of the aurora borealis, 

 and attempts to explain its cause. As already noted (p. 155), 

 it is curious that he should speak of it as something peculiar to 

 Greenland, when he must, of course, have known it well enough 

 in Norway. 



The cosmography of the " King's Mirror " is based on older 

 mediaeval writers, especially Isidore. The spherical form of 

 the earth and the course of the sun are mentioned, as is 

 Macrobius's doctrine of zones. In the frigid zones the cold 

 has attracted to itself such power that the waters throw off 

 their nature, and are changed to ice, and all the land and sea 

 is covered with ice. They are usually uninhabitable, but 

 nevertheless the author considers that Greenland lies in the 

 North Frigid zone. He thinks that " it is mainland, and con- 

 nected with other mainland," as already mentioned, because it 

 has a number of terrestrial animals that are not often found on 

 islands. It 



"lies on the extreme side of the world on the north," and he does not think 

 " there is land outside Heimskringla [the circle of the world, orbis terrarum] 

 beyond Greenland, only the great ocean which runs round the world; and it is 

 said by men who are wise that the strait through which the empty ocean flows 

 comes in by Greenland, and into the gap between the lands [landa-klofi] 

 and thereafter with fjords and gulfs it divides all countries, where it runs into 

 Heimskringla." 



247 



