A stranger to someone - a view of Norway from Salamanca

 

los raudos torbellinos de Noruega 

- Luís de Gongora, Soledades 

In the library of the University of Salamanca there are four globes, donated in the eighteenth century. They are known as the "round books", and the story goes that they were called that because the library would only accept donations in the form of books. They are displayed in the main room, available to visitors, and last year I was able to see them again when I was visiting Salamanca for a conference. 

Whenever I see early modern globes or maps of the world, I am naturally drawn towards Norway. Over the years, I have seen a lot of different premodern and early modern depictions of my native country, and I am always fascinated how these depictions deal with the rather complicated outline of the Norwegian coastline. The degree to which the map fits the terrain is an interesting starting-point for understanding what kind of cartographical information existed about Norway at the time, and very often it will become evident that to a lot of continental cartographers Norway was not very well known, at least compared to what one might expect given the relative proximity between the big map-making centres and Scandinavia. 

These maps are sources to Norwegian history, at least as long as we ask the right questions. On a non-academic level, the maps also serve as good reminders that one will always be a stranger to someone, that our known world will seem alien to someone else. In our own age, when information - if not necessarily knowledge - is easy to come by, it can also be easy to forget that our ideas about other parts of the world rarely fit with reality. And to see oneself from the outside, to see Norway from Salamanca through eighteenth-century eyes and map-making hands, is a useful reminder of the gap between perception and reality. And this is a good thing to keep in mind, both for academics and for non-academics alike.