[125] Cf. on this subject G. Storm, 1890, pp. 340, ff.; A. A. Björnbo, 1909, pp. 234, ff.
[126] Saxo also has conceptions of half-awake or half-dead (“semineces”) giants in the underworld in the north as guardians of treasures (cf. Gorm’s and Thorkel’s voyage). Moltke Moe thinks they may be derived from ancient notions of the giants as the evil dead, who guard treasures.
[127] Kohl [1869, pp. 11, ff.] supposes that they may have carried on piracy, and invented their story to explain to the bishop how they had come by the booty they brought home and how they had lost their companions, who may have been killed in fighting.
[128] Giraldus Cambrensis also mentions the dangerous whirlpool north of the Hebrides.
[129] Cf. Amund Helland, Lofoten og Vesteraalen. Norges geologiske Undersögelse. No. 23. Christiania, 1897, p. 106.
[130] Hakluyt: Principal Navigations, Glasgow, 1903, ii. p. 415.
[131] Cf. Storm, 1895, pp. 190, f.
[132] It is not impossible that it was of this Norwegian king Harold’s voyage that Adam heard from the Danes; in that case he may readily be supposed to have made a mistake and connected it with the King Harold who was then living, to whom he also attributes a voyage in the Baltic; it is a common experience that many similar incidents in which different persons were engaged collect about one of them. The circumstance that Harold is here mentioned without any term of abuse, with which Adam is elsewhere in the habit of accompanying any mention of him, is perhaps, as already said (vol. i. p. 195, note), of no particular significance. Harold Gråfeld was much in Denmark, and reports of his expedition to Bjarmeland may well have lived there, as in Iceland. If it is this to which Adam’s words refer, this would also explain the curious silence of the Icelandic authorities about Harold Hardråde’s alleged voyage in the Arctic Ocean.
[133] Professor Yngvar Nielsen [1904, 1905] thinks that Adam’s description cannot be explained otherwise than as referring to a voyage to the west, and probably a Wineland voyage. The Icelandic historian Tormodus Torfæus regarded it in the same way two hundred years ago. Professor Nielsen even thinks he can point to the Newfoundland Banks with their “surf caused by the current” (?) as a probable place where King Harold turned back to avoid the gulf of the abyss. I will not here dwell on the improbability of so daring a man as Harold, whom we are to suppose to have sailed across the Atlantic in search of Wineland, being frightened by a tide-race (of which he knew worse at home) on the Newfoundland Banks, so as to believe that he was near the abyss (“Ginnungagap”), and therefore making the long voyage home again without having accomplished his purpose, without having reached land, and without having renewed his supplies—of fresh water, for instance. I can only see that all this is pure guesswork without any solid foundation and far beyond the limits of all reasonable possibility. But in addition, as Dr. A. A. Björnbo [1909, pp. 121, 234, ff.] has clearly shown, the whole of this view becomes untenable if we pay attention to the universal cartographical representation of that time, by which Adam of Bremen was obviously also bound, and in particular it is impossible to conclude from his words that Harold’s voyage should have been made to the west.
[134] Suhm (Historie af Danmark, 1790) was the first to think that the gulf of the abyss was the maelstrom by Mosken.