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.
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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.
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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.
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