[162] It may be explained that the Lapps are called “Finns,” both in Old Norse and modern Norwegian. As it is not absolutely certain to what race these ancient “Finns” belonged, it has been thought best to retain Ottar’s name for them here.
[163] It is clear Ottar reckoned north and south according to the direction of the land, and not according to the meridian; this is a common habit among coast-dwellers who live on a coast that lies approximately north and south. Ottar’s north is consequently nearly north-east.
[164] This would be, according to the number of days’ sail given, about midway between Malangen and the North Cape, that is, about Loppen.
[165] That is to say, made a bay of the sea into the land. Ottar has now reached the North Cape.
[166] This was at the entrance to the White Sea, near Sviatoi Nos, or a little farther south-east. If Ottar took as much as six days on the voyage from Malangen to the North Cape, but only four from the North Cape to the entrance to the White Sea, which is nearly double the distance, this may possibly be explained by his sailing the first part within the skerries, among islands, thus making the distance longer and stopping oftener, while on the latter part of the voyage, where there are no islands, he may have sailed much faster with open sea and a favourable wind, and have had less temptation to stop.
[167] The most reasonable way of reading this last much-contested statement is to take “of them” as referring to the walruses, which were seven cubits long, and to understand the sentence about the Norwegian whales, which are larger, as an inserted parenthesis [cf. Japetus Steenstrup, 1889]; for it is impossible that six men could kill sixty large whales in two days, and the sobriety of Ottar’s narrative makes it very improbable that he made boasts of this sort. King Alfred evidently did not grasp the essential difference between walrus and whale. Another explanation might be that these sixty were a school of a smaller species of whale, which were caught by nets in a fjord, so that King Alfred has only confused their size with that of the larger whales of which he had also heard Ottar speak. An attempt has been made to save the sense by proposing that instead of “with six others” we should read “with six harpoons” (“syx asum”) or “with six ships” (“syx ascum”); but even if such an emendation were permissible, it does not make the statement more credible. What should Ottar do with sixty large whales, even if he could catch them? It must have been the blubber and the flesh that he wanted, but he and his men could not deal with that quantity of blubber and flesh in weeks, to say nothing of two days. Even a large whaling station at the present time, with machinery and a large staff of workmen, would have all it could do to deal with sixty large whales (“forty-eight” or “fifty” cubits long) before they became putrid, if they were all caught in two days.
[168] Cf. G. Storm, 1894, p. 95. S. E. Lönborg’s reasons [1897, p. 37] for rejecting Storm’s view and maintaining the Dvina as the river in question have little weight. Lönborg examines the statements of direction, south, north, etc., as though King Alfred and Ottar had had a map and a modern compass before them during the description. He has not remarked that Ottar has merely confined himself to the chief points of the compass, north, east, and south, and that he has not even halved them; how otherwise should we explain, for instance, that he sailed “due north along the coast” from Senjen to the North Cape? This course is no less incorrect than his sailing due south, for example, from Sviatoi Nos to the Varzuga. To one sailing along a coast, especially if it is unknown, the circumstance that one is following the land is far more important than the alterations of course that one makes owing to the sinuosities of the coast. The statement that they had the uninhabited land to starboard all the way is consequently not to be got over.
[169] His own words, that he did not know whether the land (at Sviatoi Nos) turned towards the south, or whether the sea made a bay into the land, show also that Ottar cannot have sailed across the White Sea and discovered the land on the other side.
[170] Alfred’s word “Beormas” is perhaps linguistically of the same origin as “Perm” or “Perem,” which the Russians, at any rate in later times, apply to another Finno-Ugrian people, the Permians, of Kama in north Russia [cf. Storm, 1894, p. 96].
[171] “Rosmal” comes from Old Norse “rosm-hvalr”—horse-whale, of the same meaning therefore as “hval-ross.”