Elles (elk) and Urus (aurochs) in Russia (from the Ebstorf map, 1284)
“In many parts of Nordmannia and Suedia people even of the highest rank are herdsmen,[185] living in the style of the patriarchs and by the labour of their hands. But all who dwell in Norvegia are very Christian, with the exception of those who live farther north along the coast of the ocean [i.e., in Finmark]. It is said they are still so powerful in their arts of sorcery and incantations, that they claim to know what is done by every single person throughout the world. In addition to this they attract whales to the shore by loud mumbling of words, and many other things which are told in books of the sorcerers, and which are all easy for them by practice.[186] On the wildest alps of that part I heard that there are women with beards,[187] but the men who live in the forests [i.e., the waste tracts ?] seldom allow themselves to be seen. The latter use the skins of wild beasts for clothes, and when they speak to one another it is said to be more like gnashing of teeth than words, so that they can scarcely be understood by their neighbours.[188] The same mountainous tracts are called by the Roman authors the Riphean Mountains, which are terrible with eternal snow. The Scritefingi [Skridfinns] cannot live away from the cold of the snow, and they outrun the wild beasts in their chase across the very deep snowfields. In the same mountains there is so great abundance of wild animals that the greater part of the district lives on game alone. They catch there uri [== aurochs; perhaps rather ‘ursi’ == bears ?], bubali [antelopes == reindeer ?], and elaces [elks] as in Sueonia; but in Sclavonia and Ruzzia bisons are taken; only Nortmannia however has black foxes and hares, and white martens and bears of the same colour, which live under water like uri (?),[189] but as many things here seem altogether different and unusual to our people, I will leave these and other things to be related at greater length by the inhabitants of that country.”
Then follows a reference to Trondhjem and the ecclesiastical history of the country, etc.
The Western Ocean
Of the Western Ocean, from which the Baltic issues, Adam says [iv. 10] that it
“seems to be that which the Romans called the British Ocean, whose immeasurable, fearful and dangerous breadth surrounds Britannia on the west ... washes the shores of the Frisians on the south ... towards the rising of the sun it has the Danes, the entrance to the Baltic Sea, and the Norsemen, who live beyond Dania; finally, on the north this ocean flows past the Orchades [i.e., the Shetlands, with perhaps the Orkneys], thence endlessly around the circle of the earth, having on the left Hybernia, the home of the Scots, which is now called Ireland, and on the right the skerries (‘scopulos’) of Nordmannia, and farther off the islands of Iceland and Greenland; there the ocean, which is called the dark [‘caligans’ == shrouded in darkness or mist], forms the boundary.”
Later [iv. 34], after the description of Norway, he says of the same ocean:
The Orkneys