This description gives a valuable picture of the state of society in northernmost Norway at that time. Ottar’s Finns had tame and half-tamed reindeer, and their hunting even of such sea-beasts as walrus and seal was sufficiently productive to enable them to pay a considerable tribute. These early inhabitants of the most northerly regions of the old world will be treated of later in a separate chapter.
Ottar’s mention of walrus-hunting is of great interest, as showing that it was regularly carried on both by Norwegians and Finns even at that time. Of about the same period (about the year 900) is the well-known Anglo-Saxon casket, called the Franks Casket, of which the greater part is now in the British Museum, one side being in Florence. The casket, which on account of its rich decoration is of great historical value, is made of walrus ivory. It has been thought that it might be made of the tusks that Ottar brought to King Alfred. If this was so, it is in any case improbable that so costly a treasure should be worked in a material the value and suitability of which were unknown. We must therefore suppose that walrus ivory sometimes found its way at that time to this part of Europe, and it could come from no other people but the Norwegians. They certainly carried on walrus-hunting long before Ottar’s time. This appears also from his narrative, for men who were not well practised could not kill sixty of these large animals in a couple of days, even if we are to suppose that they were killed with lances on land where they lie in big herds. If these sixty animals were really whales (i.e., small whales), and not walruses, it is still more certain evidence of long practice. We see, too, that walrus ivory and ships’ ropes of walrus hide had become such valuable objects of commerce as to be demanded in tribute. So difficult and dangerous an occupation as this hunting, which requires an equipment of special appliances, does not arise among any people in a short time, especially at so remote a period of history, when all independent development of a new civilisation, which could not come from outside, proceeded very slowly. It is therefore an interesting question whether the Norwegians developed this walrus-hunting themselves or learned it from an earlier seafaring people of hunters, who in these northern regions must consequently have been Ottar’s Finns. To find an answer to this, it will be necessary to review the whole difficult question of the Finns and Lapps connectedly, which will be done in a later section.
The walrus, called in Norwegian “rosmal”[171] or “rosmål” (also “rosmar,” and in Old Norse “rostungr”), is an arctic animal which keeps by preference to those parts of the sea where there is drift-ice, at any rate in winter. It is no longer found in Norway, but probably it visited the coasts of Finmark not unfrequently in old times, to judge from place-names such as “Rosmålvik” at Loppen, and “Rosmålen” by Hammerfest. Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its visits to the northern coasts of the country were frequent, perhaps annual [cf. Lillienskiold, 1698]. But as these places were certainly the extreme limit of its distribution, it can never have been very numerous here; like the herds of seals in our own time, it must have appeared only for more or less short visits. Curiously enough, so far as is known, walrus bones have not been observed in finds below ground in the North, while bones of other arctic animals, such as the ring-seal (Phoca fœtida), are found.
Since, therefore, the walrus cannot be supposed to have been common on the northern coasts of Norway at any time during the historical period, and since its hunting gave such valuable products, we must suppose that the Norwegian walrus-hunters were not long in looking for better and surer hunting-grounds eastward in the Polar Sea, where there is plenty of walrus. It was there too that Ottar went, for this very reason (probably because there was not enough walrus in his home waters) and, as he says, to find out how far the land extended; but it is also probable that walrus-hunters had been in these waters long before him. It is true that the statement that after three days’ sail from home he “was as far north as the farthest point reached by whalers” (“þā hwælhuntan firrest farraþ”) might mean that walrus-hunting was not carried on farther east than Loppen (where there is still a “Rosmålvik”), that is, if by these whalers is meant walrus-hunters; but doubtless these expressions are not to be taken so literally, and perhaps the meaning is rather that this was the usual limit of their voyages. Unfortunately, we have no information as to Ottar’s own catch on the eastward voyage.
Norwegian whaling
From Ottar’s statement that “in his own country there is the best whaling, they are forty-eight cubits long, and the largest are fifty cubits long,” we must conclude that the Norwegians, and perhaps the Finns also, carried on a regular whaling industry, with great whales as well as small (see later, chap. xii.).
Ottar’s voyage to South Norway and Sleswick
Of Ottar’s statements about Norway we read further in King Alfred:
“He said that Nordmanna-Land was very long and very narrow. All that is fitted either for grazing or ploughing lies on the sea, and that, however, is in some places very rocky, with wilderness [mountainous waste] rising above the cultivated land all along it. In the wilderness dwell the Finns. And the inhabited land is broadest eastward, and always narrower farther north. On the east it may be sixty leagues broad, or a little broader; and midway thirty or more, and on the north, he said, where it was narrowest, it may be three leagues to the waste land; and the wilderness in some places is so broad that it takes two weeks to cross it; and in others so broad that one can cross it in six days.
“There is side by side with the land in the south, on the other side of the wilderness, Sveoland, extending northwards, and side by side with the land in the north, Cwêna-Land. The Cwênas sometimes make raids upon the Norsemen over the wilderness, sometimes the Norsemen upon them; and there are very great freshwater lakes in this wilderness; and the Cwênas carry their ships overland to these lakes, and from thence they harry the Norsemen. They have very small ships and very light.