Uniped (from the Hereford map)
Adam relates much about these people, their customs, religion, and so forth:
Finns and Skridfinns
[iv. 24.] “Between Nordmannia and Sueonia dwell the Wermelani and Finnédi (or ‘Finvedi’) and others, who are now all Christians and belong to the church at Skara. In the borderland of the Sueones or Nordmanni on the north live the Scritefini, who are said to outrun the wild beasts in their running. Their greatest town [‘civitas,’ properly community] is Halsingland, to which Stenphi was first sent as bishop by the archbishop.... He converted many of the same people by his preaching.” Helsingland was inhabited by Helsingers, who were certainly Germanic Scandinavians and not Skridfinns; but Adam seems to have thought that all the people of northern Sueonia or Suedia (he has both forms) belonged to the latter race.
“On the east it [i.e., Sweden] touches the Riphæan Mountains, where there are immense waste tracts with very deep snow, where hordes of monstrous human beings further hinder the approach. There are the Amazons, there are the Cynocephali, and there the Cyclopes, who have one eye in their forehead. There are those whom Solinus calls ‘Ymantopodes’ [one-footed men], who hop upon one leg, and those who delight in human flesh for food, and just as one avoids them, so is one rightly silent about them.[184] The very estimable king of the Danes told me that a people were wont to come down from the mountains into the plains; they were of moderate height, but the Swedes were scarcely a match for them on account of their strength and activity, and it is uncertain from whence they come. They come suddenly, he said, sometimes once a year or every third year, and if they are not resisted with all force they devastate the whole district, and go back again. Many other things are usually related, which I, since I study brevity, have omitted, so that they may tell them who assert that they have seen them.”
It is probably the roving mountain Lapps that are here described. Descending suddenly into the plains with their herds of reindeer, they must then, as now, have done great damage to the peasants’ crops and pastures; and the peasants were certainly not content with killing the reindeer, as they sometimes do still, but also attacked the Lapps themselves. Although the latter are not a warlike people, they were forced to defend themselves, and that the Swedes and Norwegians are scarcely a match for them in strength and activity may be true even now.
Cannibals in Eastern Europe (from the Hereford map)
Nortmannia or Nordvegia
[iv. 30.] “Nortmannia [Norway], as it is the extreme province of the earth, may also be suitably placed last in our book. It is called by the people of the present day ‘Norguegia’ [or ‘Nordvegia’] ... This kingdom extends to the extreme region of the North, whence it has its name.” From “projecting headlands in the Baltic Sound it bends its back northwards, and after it has gone in a bow along the border of the foaming ocean, it finds its limit in the Riphean Mountains, where also the circle of the earth is tired and leaves off. Nortmannia is on account of its stony mountains or its immoderate cold the most unfertile of all regions, and only suited to rearing cattle. The cattle are kept a long time in the waste lands, after the manner of the Arabs. They live on their herds, using their milk for food and their wool for clothes. Thus the country rears very brave warriors, who, not being softened by any superfluity in the products of their country, more often attack others than are themselves disturbed. They live at peace with their neighbours, namely the Sveones, although they are sometimes raided, but not with impunity, by the Danes, who are equally poor. Consequently, forced by their lack of possessions, they wander over the whole world and by their piratical expeditions bring home the greater part of the wealth of the countries.” But after their conversion to Christianity they improved, and they are “the most temperate of all men both in their diet and their morals.” They are very pious, and the priests turn this to account and fleece them. “Thus the purity of morals is destroyed solely through the avarice of the clergy.”