III.] 
OLD ACCOUNTS OF THE WALRUS. 
159 
well-known Norse confession written in the end of the eleventh 
century, “ Konungs skuggsja” (the King’s Mirror), as an animal 
resembling the seal/ except that, besides several smaller teeth, it 
has two large tusks which project beyond the upper jaw. This 
clear and unexaggerated sketch is however replaced in the later 
writings of the middle ages by the most extraordinary accounts 
of the animal’s appearance and mode of capture. Thus Albertus 
Magnus/ who died in 1280, says that the walrus is taken by the 
hunter, while the sleeping animal hangs by its large tusks to a 
cleft of the rock, cutting out a piece of its skin and fastening to 
it a strong rope whose other end is tied to trees, posts, or large 
1 I saw in 1858 a Phoca harhata with tusks worn away by age, which 
in its reddish-brown colour very much resembled a walrus, and was little 
inferior to it in size. 
^ Albertus Magnus, De animalihus^ Mantua, 1479, Lib. xxiv. At the 
same place however is given a description of the whale-fishery grounded 
on actual experience, but with the shrewd addition that what the old 
authors had written on the subject did not correspond with experience. 
