The Langobard author Paulus Warnefridi, also called Diaconus (about 720-790), gives for the most part more or less confused extracts from earlier authors, but he seems besides to have obtained some new information about the North. Just as the Goth Jordanes (or Cassiodorus, or Ablabius) makes the Goths emigrate from Ptolemy’s Scandza, so Paulus, following earlier authors,[150] makes the Langobards proceed from Pliny’s island Scatinavia, far in the north. It looks as though at that time a northern origin was held in high esteem. But Paulus describes the country, from the statements of those who have seen it, as not “really lying in the sea, but the waves wash the low shores.” This points to a confusion here with a district called Scatenauge by the Elbe, which in a somewhat later MS. (about 807) of the Langobardic Law is mentioned as the home of the Langobards [cf. Lönborg, 1897, p. 27]. Paulus further relates that on the coast “north-west towards the uttermost boundaries of Germany” there lie seven men asleep in a cave, for how long is uncertain. They resemble the Romans in appearance, and both they and their clothes are unharmed, and they are regarded by the inhabitants as holy. The legend of the Seven Sleepers is already found in Gregory of Tours, who has it from Asia Minor, where it arose in the third century and was located at Ephesus [cf. J. Koch, 1883]. The legend was very common in Germania, and we find it again later in tales of shipwreck on the coast of Greenland.[151]
“Near to this place [i.e., the cave with the seven men] dwell the ‘Scritobini’;[152] thus is this people called; they have snow even in summer time, and they eat nothing but the raw flesh of wild beasts, as they do not differ from the beasts themselves in intelligence, and they also make themselves clothes of their skins with the hair on. Their name is explained from the word ‘to leap’ in the foreign tongue [i.e., Germanic], for by leaping with a certain art they overtake the wild beasts with a piece of wood bent like a bow. Among them is an animal which is not much unlike a stag, and I have seen a dress made of the hide of this animal, just as if it was bristling with hairs, and it was made like a tunic and reached to the knees, as the above-mentioned Scritobini wear it, as I have told. In these parts, at the summer solstice, there is seen for several days, even at night, the clearest light, and they have there much more daylight than elsewhere, as on the other hand, about the winter solstice, even if there is daylight, the sun itself is not seen there, and the day is shorter than in any other place, the nights also are longer; for the farther one goes away from the sun, the nearer the sun appears to the earth [the horizon], and the shadows become longer.”...
The oldest known picture of a ski-runner
(from the Hereford map’s representation
of Norway, thirteenth century)
“And not far from the shore which we before spoke of [by the cave] on the west, where the ocean extends without bounds, is that very deep abyss of the waters which we commonly call the ocean’s navel. It is said twice a day to suck the waves into itself, and to spew them out again; as is proved to happen along all these coasts, where the waves rush in and go back again with fearful rapidity. Such a gulf or whirlpool is called by the poet Virgil Caribdis, and in his poem he says it is in the strait by Sicily, as he says:
‘Scilla lies on the right hand
and the implacable Caribdis on the left.
And three times it sucks the vast billows
down into the abyss with the deep whirlpool
of the gulf, and it sends them up again into the air,
and the wave lashes the stars.’
“By the whirlpool of which we have spoken it is asserted that ships are often drawn in with such rapidity that they seem to resemble the flight of arrows through the air; and sometimes they are lost in this gulf with a very frightful destruction. Often just as they are about to go under, they are brought back again by a sudden shock of the waves, and they are sent out again thence with the same rapidity with which they were drawn in. It is asserted that there is also another gulf of the same kind between Britain and the Gallician province” [i.e., northern Spain], whereupon there follows a description of the tides on the south coast of France and at the mouths of the rivers, after which there is a highly coloured account of the horrors of the Ebudes, where they can hear the noise of the waters rushing towards a similar Caribdis.
Paulus Warnefridi evidently had a very erroneous idea of ski-running, which he made into a leaping instead of a gliding motion. He may have imagined that they jumped about on pieces of wood bent like bows. That the abyss of waters or navel of the sea is thought to be in the North may be due to reports either of the current in the Pentland Firth or of the Mosken-ström or the Salt-ström, which thus make their appearance here in literature, and which were afterwards developed into the widespread ideas of the Middle Ages about maelstroms and abysses in the sea, perhaps by being connected with the ancient Greek conception of the uttermost abyss (Tartarus, Anostus, Ginnungagap; see [pp. 11], [12], [17]), and as here with the description of the current in the Straits of Messina.
The Maelstrom near the Lofoten Islands (from Olaus Magnus)