CHAPTER V
THE AWAKENING OF MEDIÆVAL KNOWLEDGE OF THE NORTH
KING ALFRED, OTTAR, ADAM OF BREMEN
In the ninth century the increasingly frequent Viking raids, Charlemagne’s wars and conquests in the North, and the labours of Christian missionaries, brought about an increase of intercourse, both warlike and peaceful, between southern Europe and the people of the Scandinavian North. The latter had gradually come to play a certain part on the world’s stage, and their enterprises began to belong to history. Their countries were thereby more or less incorporated into the known world. Now for the first time the mists that had lain over the northern regions of Europe began to lift, to such an extent that the geographical knowledge of the Middle Ages became clearer, and reached farther than that of the Greeks a thousand years earlier.
King Alfred, 849-901
But while in the foregoing centuries the clouds had moved slowly, they were now rapidly dispelled from large tracts of the northern lands and seas. This was due in the first place to the voyages of the Scandinavians, especially of the Norwegians. By their sober accounts of what they had found they directed geographical science into new and fruitful channels, and freed it little by little from the dead weight of myths and superstitions which it had carried with it through the ages from antiquity. We find the first decisive step in this direction in the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great of England (849-circa 901 A.D.).
King Alfred had Orosius’s Latin history done into Anglo-Saxon, and himself translated large portions of the work. By about 880 he was at peace with the Danish Vikings, to whom he had been obliged to cede the north-eastern half of England. He died about 901. His literary activity must no doubt have fallen within the period between these dates. Finding the geographical introduction to Orosius’s work inadequate, especially as regards northern Europe, he added what he had learnt from other sources. Thus, from information probably obtained from Germans, he gives a survey of Germany, which he makes extend northwards “to the sea which is called ‘Cwên-sæ̂.’” What is meant by this is not quite clear; it might be the Polar Sea or the White Sea; on the other hand, it may be the Baltic or the Gulf of Bothnia; for the text does not make it certain whether King Alfred regarded Scandinavia as a peninsula connected with the continent or not. He speaks of countries and peoples on the “Ost-sæ̂”,[160] and he mentions amongst others the South Danes and North Danes both on the mainland (Jutland) and the islands—both peoples with the Ost-sæ̂ to the north of them—further the “Osti” (probably the Esthonians, who also had this arm of the sea, the Ost-sæ̂, to the north), Wends and Burgundians (Bornholmers ?), who “have the same arm of the sea to the west of them, and the Sveones (Svear) to the north.” “The Sveones have south of them the Esthonian [‘Osti’] arm of the sea, and east of them the Sermende [Sarmatians ? or Russians ?]; and to the north, beyond the uninhabited tracts [‘wêstenni’], is ‘Cwên-land’; and north-west of them are the ‘Scride-Finnas,’ and to the west the Norwegians (‘Norðmenn’).”
Map of Northern Scandinavia and the White Sea