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.