Fridtjof Nansen

“ The mass of knowledge the Norwegians had acquired about the northern regions, before their time entirely unknown, was to a great extent forgotten again; and at the close of the Middle Ages all that remained was the communication with Iceland and the knowledge of the neighbouring seas, besides the continuance of the connection between the White Sea and Norway; while the voyage to Greenland, to say nothing of America, was forgotten, at any rate by the mass of the people.
The development of humanity often proceeds with a strangely lavish waste of forces. ”

“ We saw that to the eyes of the oldest civilisation in history and down through the whole of antiquity, the North lay for the most part concealed in the twilight of legend and myth; here and there genuine information finds its way into literature, but is again effaced. At the beginning of the Middle Ages the dark curtain thickens. ”

“ If we would discover how a watercourse is formed, from the very first bog-streams up in the mountain, we must follow a multitude of tiny rills, receiving one fresh stream after another from every side, running together into burns, which grow and grow and form little rivers, till we come to the end of the wooded hillside and are suddenly face to face with the great river in the valley below. ”

“ To begin with, it is in itself unlikely that the peaceful and unwarlike Eskimo, who can have had no practice in warfare, since they had previously had no one to fight with, except walruses and bears, should have come with a “fleet” and made an organised attack in large masses, and destroyed people and houses and churches in the Eastern Settlement. Even if they might have been provoked to resistance or even revenge by ill-usage on the part of the Greenlanders, or perhaps have coveted their iron implements, it is an impossibility that they should have organised themselves for a campaign. ”

“ From the beginning of the fifteenth century Bristol was in frequent communication with Iceland, both for the fishery and for trade. As already pointed out, this was certainly due in no small degree to the number of Norwegians who had settled in the town. Sailors and merchants returning from voyages to Iceland doubtless brought thence many tales of marvels and of unknown islands and countries out in the ocean; legends of the Icelanders’ voyages to Greenland and Wineland may have served to entertain the winter evenings in Bristol. ”

“ One is inclined to think that the Skrælings of the saga have come about through a combination of the original mythical creatures (like the síd-people in the Irish happy lands) to whom at first the name belonged with the Eskimo that the Icelanders found in Greenland, and perhaps the Eskimo and Indians that they found on the north-east coast of North America. It is, as in fact Moltke Moe has maintained in his lectures, by the fusing of materials taken from the world of myth and from [Pg 17] reality that the human imagination is rendered most fertile and creative in the formation of legend. ”

“ When we have shorn Adam’s tale of all borrowed features, is there enough left to make it possible that the Norwegian king Harold undertook a voyage out into the ocean? It is not easy to form a definite opinion on this, but the probability must be that King Svein or the Danes told some such story, which was then adorned by Master Adam. As the voyage was supposed to have taken place recently, it must be Harold Hardråde who was intended, otherwise one might be led to think of Harold Gråfeld’s celebrated voyage to Bjarmeland. ”

“ In spite of the religious fanaticism which in the seventh century made them an irresistible nation of conquerors, they had civilisation enough to remember that “the ink of science is worth more than the blood of martyrs,” and there flourished among them a remarkably copious literature, with an endless variety of works, from the ninth century through the whole of the Middle Ages. ”

“ It is in itself a strange thing that the discovery of a country like North America, with conditions so much more favourable than Greenland and Iceland, should not have led to a permanent settlement. But there are many, and in my judgment sufficient, reasons which explain this. We must remember that such an outpost of civilisation as Greenland offered poor opportunities for the equipment of such settlements ”

“ Distribution Of all the races of the earth that of the Eskimo is the one that has established itself farthest north. His world is that of sea-ice and cold, for which nature had not intended human beings. In his slow, stubborn fight against the powers of winter he has learnt better than any other how to turn these to account, and in these regions, along the ice-bound shores, he developed his peculiar culture, with its ingenious appliances, long before the beginning of history. ”

“ The resemblances to Karlsevne and his people flying with all speed before the black ball of the [Pg 10] Skrælings, like a sheep’s paunch, which is flung over them from a pole and makes an ugly noise when it falls, is obvious; but at the same time it looks as though this incident of the Irish myth—which is an echo of the classical Cyclopes of the Æneid and Odyssey (cf. Polyphemus and the Cyclopes) , and the great stones that were thrown at Odysseus—had been “modernised” by the saga-writer, who has transferred mediæval European catapults and explosives to the Indians. ”

“ Every one who has had experience of the navigation of sailing ships knows how difficult it is under such conditions to make way in the precise direction one wishes, however good one’s reckoning may be; currents and lee-way set one far out of the reckoned course, and on a voyage so long as across the Atlantic the lee-way may be considerable. Whether Cabot was able to correct his reckoning by the aid of astronomical observations (with a Jacob’s staff or an astrolabe) we do not know, but we hear nothing of latitudes, so that it is not very probable (cf. also Columbus’s gross error in latitude) . ”

“ The map of the world in the Medici atlas is drawn in the same way as the compass-charts. It has no names of towns in Scandinavia, and the westernmost tongue of land is without a name (see the reproduction) . On the other hand, the name “alolanda” occurs inland in eastern Norway, and is there obviously a corruption of “Hallandia” (cf. p. 227) . This mappamundi is interesting from the fact that it makes the land-masses of the continent extend without a limit on the north, whereas Africa is terminated by a peninsula on the south. ”

“ There is always the essential objection to be made against the Eskimo having migrated to the southern east coast round the north of Greenland, that the conditions of life for Eskimo, who live principally by sealing and whaling, were poor on the north coast of Greenland, where there are no seals worth mentioning and few bears; and they can scarcely have got enough musk-oxen to support themselves. ”

“ The spherical form of the earth and the course of the sun are mentioned, as is Macrobius’s doctrine of zones. In the frigid zones the cold has attracted to itself such power that the waters throw off their nature and are changed to ice, and all the land and sea is covered with ice. They are usually uninhabitable, but nevertheless the author considers that Greenland lies in the north frigid zone. He thinks that “it is mainland, and connected with other mainland,” as already mentioned, because it has a number of terrestrial animals that are not often found on islands. ”

“ Olaf’s reign he was on a trading voyage to Dublin; “when he sailed westward from thence he was making for Iceland. He sailed to the west of Ireland, encountered there a strong north-east wind, and was driven far to the west and south-west in the ocean,” until they finally came to a great land which was unknown to them. They did not know the people there, “but thought rather that they spoke Irish.” Soon many hundred men collected about them, seized and bound them, and drove them up into the country. ”

“ At least as old as the Norsemen’s conceptions of countries beyond the ocean in the North was probably the idea of the great abyss, Ginnungagap, which there forms the boundary of the ocean and of the world, and which must be derived from the Tartarus and Chaos of the Greeks (cf. p. 150) . When the Polar Sea (Hafsbotn) was closed by the land connection between Bjarmeland and Greenland, it was natural that those who tried to form a consistent view of the world could no longer find a place for the abyss in that direction ”

“ The greatest achievements in history have been brought about more by the aid of ideas than of truth. Religious illusions have ennobled the rude masses and raised them to higher forms of society; in the domain of science intuition and hypothesis have led to fresh victories, as also in geographical exploration; there too illusions, like a fata Morgana, have impelled men forward to great discoveries. ”

“ The great Alexander, the conquering king, held sway over the greater part of the world of his day; the bright young lord of the world remained the ideal for a thousand years, the hero above all others. ”

“ As regards Norway, this consists of information from Querini’s voyage in 1432, as well as from other sources which are unknown to us; this is indicated by, amongst other things, an inscription on the sea to the north of Russia [“Permia”] , which relates that a short time before two Catalan ships had sailed thither [cf. Vangensten, 1910] . On this map the Scandinavian Peninsula has been given a more reasonable extension to the north; but the west coast is very imaginatively supplied with peninsulas and islands, while the ocean outside is full of fabulous islands and contains many legends. ”

“ He came first to Japan; but went farther and farther out into the ocean until he really reached Horaisan; there he enjoyed complete happiness, and never thought of returning to prolong his tyrant’s life.
The old Japanese wise man, Vasobiove, who had withdrawn from the world and passed his days in contemplative peace, was one day out fishing by himself (to avoid many trivial visits) , when he was driven out to sea by a violent storm; he then rowed about the sea, keeping himself alive by fishing. ”

“ It may be the expression “piratæ,” which might be used both of an ordinary pirate and of a privateer or freebooter, which misled Olaus Magnus into constructing this wonderful story. The mere fact that, both in his map of 1539 and in his work of 1555, he makes Hvitserk, which of course was in Greenland, into a rocky island out at sea between Greenland and Iceland, where no island is to be found, is enough to shake one’s belief in the trustworthiness of this strange report. His incomprehensible story of the compass constructed there does not make things any better. ”

“ A similar task confronts him who endeavours to explore the first trickling rivulets of human knowledge; he must trace all the minute, uncertain, often elusive beginnings, follow the diversity of tributaries from all parts of the earth, and show how the mass of knowledge increases constantly from age to age, sometimes reposing in long stretches of dead water, half choked with peat and rushes, at other times plunging onward in foaming rapids. ”

“ Again there is a glimmer of light, first from the intermingling of nations at the time of the migrations, then from new trading voyages and intercourse, until the great change is brought about by the Norsemen, who with their remarkable power of expansion overran western and southern Europe [Pg 381] and penetrated the vast unknown solitudes in the North, found their way to the White Sea, discovered the wide Polar Sea and its shores, colonised the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland, and were the first discoverers of the Atlantic Ocean and of North America. ”

“ They heave themselves up by their tusks to the tops of rocks as with ladders, in order to eat the grass bedewed with fresh water, and roll themselves back into the sea, unless in the meantime they are overcome by very deep sleep and remain hanging. ”

“ True, it is known that certain Indian tribes used to cover their canoes with double buffalo hides, a fact which the authors mentioned cannot have remarked, since they regard hide-boats as decisive evidence of Eskimo culture; moreover, the Irish still cover their coracles with ox-hides; but neither buffaloes nor oxen were to be found in Nova Scotia; are we, then, to suppose that the natives used deer-skin? The whole line of argument than leads us from one improbability to another, as we might expect, seeing it is built up on so flimsy a foundation. ”

“ The earth is divided in purely formal fashion into five zones, two of which are habitable: our temperate zone and the unknown temperate zone of the antipodes (in the southern hemisphere) ; and three uninhabitable: the torrid zone with the equatorial ocean, and the two frigid zones, north and south. These conceptions also reached the North at an early time, and are mentioned in the “King’s Mirror,” amongst other works, although its author thought that the inhabited part of Greenland really lay in the frigid zone. A zone-map from Iceland is also known of the thirteenth century. ”