Reading-spots, part 10 - The wonders of Ireland

 

I am in Dublin for a conference, and the journey has been long albeit relatively smooth. For reading material, I brought my copy of an early-twentieth-century copy of Konungs Skuggjsá, the King's Mirror, a didactic treatise from mid-thirteenth-century Norway. The choice was mainly due to the fact that I have been meaning to read this from end to end, and I thought that the lulls of a lengthy travel might provide good opportunities to delve into it. But another important element in the process of choosing was that the book also contains a description of wonders of Ireland. These wonders - discussed together with the natural wonders of Iceland and Greenland - comprise both stories of saints, marvellous landscapes and wondrous animals. 

I began reading this translation on the flight from Oslo, but quickly fell asleep. When I arrived in Dublin, there was plenty of time to delve deeper into the book, and by the time I managed to get a rather belated lunch I had reached the discussion of natural wonders. I had found a lovely café which to my fortune served one of the true wonders of Ireland, the full Irish breakfast, and I sat down to refill my energy after having been awake since three in the morning. There was a lovely harmony in eating this rich meal while reading about how Norwegians in the thirteenth century envision the country that I am now visiting for the second time in my life. Such ideas about distant lands are always illuminating and highly interesting to me, especially when those ideas are juxtaposed with the more mundane materialities of travel. 

The edge of knowledge – sixteenth-century cartography and the North

 

The sixteenth century is one of the most dynamic periods in the history of European cartography. Not only did the voyages of the era provide new knowledge that was transmitted through maps, but experimentation with projections and ways of transmitting knowledge about the world led to a wide variety of maps. However, in some cases the cartographers got things wrong. In some cases – as I hope to blog about at a later point – it was because the sources were faulty, and this is the explanation for why we find a lot of non-existent islands of some of the most cutting edge maps of the period. In other cases, knowledge got warped in transmission. It is one such case I want to write about here.      

 

Knowledge could be warped in a multitude of ways along the chain of transmission. In some cases, the knowledge could be faulty from the start, whereas in other cases something might get lost in translation, seeing as knowledge often passed through several different languages on its way from observation to the map itself. In the present case, the main reason appears to be a mixture of unfamiliarity with the territory in question, combined with unfamiliarity with the language(s) of that region.  

Septentrionalium partium nova tabula (1561)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

In 1561, Girolamo Ruscelli, a cartographer based in Venice, printed two maps of the North Atlantic theatre – one detailed, one rather stylised. The detailed map is known as Septentrionalium partium nova tabula, a new map of the northern parts. This map contains a lot of placenames, including settlements, rivers and islands. These names are often imprecise, suggesting how difficult it could be for those from – for example – the Netherlands or Italy to accurately render the Icelandic, Danish or Norwegian pronunciations. In the case of Iceland, this difficulty is in part suggested by the choice of using Latinised names of the island’s two dioceses, Skálholt and Hólar, rendered as Scalodin and Olensis. While the accuracy of these names can be discussed, the names themselves are correct insofar as the identification of the diocesan sees is concerned.     

 

What is more puzzling, however, is to consider the correct identification of the detailed map with some elements of the more stylised map, the so-called Schonladia Nuova, new Schonladia, issued in the same year. There are several interesting differences in the presentation of Iceland and Greenland in these two maps. The detailed map contains both names, respectively Islanda and Engronelant, the latter suggesting that information was transmitted through Dutch interlocutors. The stylised map, however, does not provide a name for Greenland – and indeed seems to suggest that Greenland is linked with the Kola peninsula – whereas Iceland is identified as Thyle, an alternative spelling of Thule. That Iceland is given the name Thule is not surprising, as these two names were used interchangeably about the island throughout the Middle Ages. Another interesting difference, however, is that the stylised map includes a stretch of frozen sea, the ‘mare congelatum’, which forms a belt of ice along the coast of Greenland.

Schonladia Nuova (1561)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

The most surprising difference between the two maps, however, is that the stylised map contains a strange duplication of names – a duplication of sorts. In this map, there are two place names on Iceland, namely the two dioceses. However, the names are not the same as those found in Septentrionalium partium nova tabula. Instead, the dioceses are called Skalholten and Holen. These are Danified names, and suggest that the information has been transmitted through Danish informants in Venice. A direct Danish contact would not be all that surprising, considering that several Scandinavian ecclesiastics were in exile following the Protestant reformations in Denmark-Norway and Sweden. Given the accuracy of these names, it is therefore curious to see that the Latinised and less accurate names found on the detailed map are still included in Schonladia Nuova, but not where we would expect them to be. Rather, the two Latinised names have been moved to Greenland, where they are rendered as Scalholdin and Holenses, the placements of which do not correspond to any placename in Greenland in Septentrionalium partium nova tabula. We seem to be dealing with some kind of overcorrection, where an attempt to include the vernacular names of Iceland’s two dioceses in the new map has replicated the error elsewhere. This is, of course, presuming that Schonladia Nuova was produced after the other map, which seems likely given the confusion in question.    

 

The case of the duplicated Icelandic names is a good example of how certain parts of the sixteenth-century world were, in effect, the edge of knowledge. Along this edge, some certainties existed – such as the fact that Greenland and Iceland were real places – and so did many uncertainties, such as how to accurately and correctly render the names of these places. The confusion in Schonladia Nuova is not only due to the fact that Venice is a long way away from Iceland and Greenland. It is also indicative of how Greenland was falling off the European edge of knowledge in this period. Throughout the fifteenth century the contact between the Norse settlements in Greenland and the rest of Europe dwindled and eventually stopped. Bishops continued to be appointed to Greenland’s diocesan see, Garðar, but these were bishops in name only and never set foot on the island itself. Greenland was still known, if mainly as a memory or as a landmass occasionally seen by voyagers who traversed the Greenland Sea. Consequently, instead of knowledge there was a lot of information about Greenland, and most of it appears to have been incorrect, as seen in the confusion regarding Scalholdin and Holensis. In this way, knowledge warped into information, and information was tainted by hearsay, legend, and fiction, but became common misconceptions through the medium of maps.

Schonladia Nuova (1561) (detail)

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

Schonladia Nuova (1598) (detail)

The sea monster is a decorative embellishment in the 1598 edition of the map

Courtesy of the University of Tromsø's map collection

A game piece and the interconnectedness of the medieval world

 

As is well known in contemporary scholarship, the medieval world - however delineated and defined - was much more interconnected than has commonly been acknowledged. While few individuals travelled vast distances, goods and ideas did so very frequently. Moreover, the interconnectedness of the medieval world existed in sprawling networks of contacts - whether diplomatic, mercantile, religious, intellectual, cultural or military - and movement could occur in many different direction.  

There are several medieval sources that demonstrate and even embody this interconnectedness, and today I was reminded of one such example as I was browsing through some old photos. The object in question is currently housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is a game piece - possibly for checkers - carved in the Rhineland region around the year 1200. The material from which the piece is carved is walrus ivory, which was an important trade commodity of the twelfth century. It is likely that the ivory was brought from Greenland, possibly via ports in Norway, as this appears to be the most common route by which walrus ivory travelled to the European continent in the period.

Aside from the materiality of the game piece, the image carved into it is an example of how widely stories travelled in the Middle Ages. The scene depicted on the game piece shows Alexander the Great borne aloft by two griffins, one of the most iconic and common scenes from the Alexander legend, as it travelled westward throughout the medieval period through adaptations and retellings of the legend by Pseudo-Callisthenes. Those who played with this game piece were most likely of the secular nobility or perhaps the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and they are likely to have been very familiar with the Alexander legend - perhaps more familiar with the ideas of distant India conveyed through that legend than the northern waters in which the walrus was hunted.     

The ideas about distant lands entertained by those who used this game piece were most likely very inaccurate and based on legends and distorted reports that had travelled through many stages to arrive in the Rhineland around the year 1200. However, even if they were wrong about the wider world, they knew the wider world existed, and they knew that it was possible to travel back and forth between the familiar and the unfamiliar, yet known, parts of the world

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, KK 9962

What the walrus tells us - language, translation and identity-construction in Historia Norwegie

Today, August 30, I conducted a seminar in a half-term course for first-year students that I have designed myself. The course focusses on the cult of saints and history-writing in twelfth-century Norway, and one of the main intended outcomes is that the students will have an understanding of how Norwegian clerics formulated a Christian identity through the writing of chronicles.

In today’s seminar, we were examining aspects of the chronicle Historia Norwegie, an account of Norway’s geography and history which was composed in Oslo by an unknown chronicler sometime close to 1170. The work only survives in incomplete late-medieval transmissions. A good overview of its history can be found here, while an Open Access edition with translation and critical commentary can be found here.  

For the seminar, I had selected a handful of passages that could help to demonstrate how the anonymous chronicler shaped this book so that it both served a domestic and a foreign audience, in order for Norway to both adhere to the hallmarks of a Christian country, as well as stand out as something unique. This balance of conformity and uniqueness is a key element in identity formation. This was perhaps especially true within an intellectual culture as that of medieval Latin Christendom, where there was a divinely woven pattern in history, and where that pattern could be discerned by elements in new places – such as peripheral Norway – that resembled in well-established, central places – such as the Holy Land, Italy or France.  

Perhaps my favourite passage that highlights this balance between an interior and an exterior audience can be seen in the chronicler’s overview of the dangers of the Greenland Sea in Chapter 2. Here, the chronicler includes a list of sea creatures that inhabit these waters. Among these is the ‘pistrix’, a whale-like creature, perhaps a sawfish, that can be found together with the baleen whale in the Indian Ocean, according to Pliny’s Natural History (book 9, chapter 3). Here we see, in other words, how the anonymous chronicler has used a name familiar to the exterior audience, who are likely to – or at least expected to – have read Pliny. 

Following the pistrix, the anonymous chronicler mentions the ‘hafstramb’, a creature with neither head nor tail, and which dips up and down like the trunk of a tree. This is the earliest known reference to this beast, and to this day there is no consensus about what it is meant to signify. Shortly after, the reader is also presented with two other creatures, the ‘hafguva’ and the ‘hafkitta’, and these two are likewise not identified with any certainty. It is worth noting that the name ‘hafkitta’ can be understood as ‘sea-cat’ (from ‘haf’ meaning ‘sea’ and ‘kitta’ meaning ‘cat’ or ‘she-cat’), and that this is a common Norwegian name for the wolf fish or sea-wolf. It is unclear whether the anonymous chronicler had this particular fish in mind when referring to the ‘hafkitta’, and it is possible that reports such as that in Historia Norwegie has influenced the later appellation of this name to this particular fish.

What is notable in this passage, however, is that all these three beasts are referred to by their Norse names, whereas the pistrix is referred to by its Latin name. We see here, in other words, that some beasts are common to several places, e.g., the pistrix, whereas others are unique to Norway and its maritime zone. In other words, the chronicler balanced known and unknown, domestic and foreign, local and universal, Norse and Latin, in a way that served to cement the identity of Norway as a place with unique things and typical things.  

But then there is the walrus. And the walrus shows us the borderland between the known and the unknown for readers outside of Norway, at least according to the expectations of the chronicler. The walrus is presented as ‘equinus cetus monoculus’, the one-eyed horse-whale. This is a literal translation of the Norse ‘hrosshvalr’, which is the basis for the Modern English ‘walrus’ and the Modern Norwegian ‘kvalross’. The walrus is undoubtedly a beast typical of the Northern waters and well suited to demonstrate the unique aspects of Norway and its historical identity – in this case represented by natural history. But the name is not given in the vernacular, but is instead rendered as a literal translation, just as the name of its native haunt, Greenland, or ‘Virida Terra’. 

When the chronicler found it useful to employ vernacular terms for beasts typical of the Greenland Sea, why did he not do so in the case of the walrus? Or, for that matter, why did he translate Greenland? The answer is, most likely, that unlike the three other beasts, the walrus was not an unknown entity to exterior readers. By 1170, the walrus was the main source of ivory for the craftspeople of Northern Europe, and although the animal itself had not been observed by men and women who never ventured into the Arctic waters, they knew very well where the ivory came from. Consequently, the walrus was a point of reference that would register in the minds of the foreign readers of Historia Norwegie, and it would be something familiar, unlike the obscure and terrifying beasts such as the ‘hafstramb’. Through the walrus, in other words, the chronicler managed to showcase a unique aspect of Norwegian natural history that could resonate with readers who did not speak Norse. It was therefore useful to render the name of this beast in Latin. In this way, the walrus aided the chronicler in shaping a Norwegian identity.     

New publication: Thirteenth-century Ivory Crozier from Greenland from the Perspective of Economic History

Last year, I submitted a proposal for an article to the online Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages published by ARC Humanitites and Bloomsbury. I offered to write an entry on a crozier of walrus ivory that was discovered in Igaliku, Greenland, the site of the medieval bishopric of Garðar, and so I spent much of the summer of 2020 researching medieval Greenland and its connections to the trade routes on the European continent. The main purpose of this encyclopedia entry is to highlight Greenland's place in the network of trade and exchange that stretched across medieval Europe and beyond. 

As this is an online encyclopedia, and entries are published in batches, I was unaware that my article had been made available until earlier this week, and I am terribly excited to be one of many contributors to this expanding reference work. Access to the encyclopedia can be bought here, and my particular article is located here. I hope to be using this encyclopedia in future teaching, and it is a great resource for getting a more global perspective on the framework of what we call the medieval.

Crozier and ring from Garðar, Greenland
Courtesy of Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, D11154; D11155