[155] Pistorius, Polonicæ historiæ corpus, 1582, i. 150. I have not had an opportunity of consulting this work. We saw above ([p. 163, note]) that Olaus Magnus also quotes Mikhow.
[156] Cf. Noël, 1815, p. 215.
[157] The idea may have arisen through a misunderstanding of stories that the walruses often lie in great herds, close together, on the tops of skerries and small islands, and are there speared in great numbers by the hunters.
[158] He calls my attention to two papers by Professor Sophus Bugge [in “Romania,” iii. 1874, p. 157, and iv. 1875, p. 363], in which the etymology of the French word “morse” is discussed. Bugge first seeks to explain the word (precisely as above) as a metathesis for “rosme,” from the Danish “rosmer” == Old Norwegian “rosmáll,” “rosmhvalr.” In the second paper he withdraws this explanation, and says that V. Thomsen has pointed out to him the identity of “morse” with the Russian “morsh,” Polish “mors,” Czeckish “mrž,” Finnish “mursu,” Lappish “morš.” The word would “according to V. Thomsen be rather of Slavic (cf. ‘more,’ sea ?) than of Finnish origin.” After what has been advanced above, this last conclusion may be somewhat improbable. Professor Nielsen also refers to Matzenauer, Cizi slova, [p. 257], which I have not had an opportunity of consulting.
[159] Professor Olaf Broch has described to me the peculiar river-boat that is used far and wide in North Russia, and that is evidently a very old type of boat. Broch saw it on the Súkhona, a tributary of the Dvina. The bottom of the boat is a dug-out tree-trunk of considerable size, which can only be found farther up the country. By heating the wood the sides are given the desired shape, and to the dug-out foundation is fastened a board on each side; Broch did not remember whether it was sewed or nailed on. The boat is thus a transitional form between the dug-out canoe and the clinker-built boat. This type of boat may also have reached the shore of the Polar Sea; but there cannot have been timber for building it there.
[160] Cf. A. Helland, Nordlands Amt, 1908, ii. p. 888.
[161] Cf. K. Leem, 1767, p. 216.
[162] The Florentine MS. of it dates from the ninth century.
[163] For this reason they were also called OT-maps, which corresponded to the initial letters of “orbis terrarum.”
[164] The work is preserved in the British Museum in a MS. of the fourteenth century, which unfortunately has not been published. The geographical descriptions in the Eulogium Historiarum of about 1360 (vol. ii. Rerum Britann. Medii Ævi Script., London, 1860, cf. the introduction by F. S. Hayden) may be taken from this work. It is evidently a MS. of the same “Geographia” that W. Wackernagel found in the library at Berne, and of which he published extracts relating to the North [1844]. It is probably the same “Geographia Universalis,” again, that is published in Bartholomæus Anglicus: De proprietatibus rerum, and in Rudimenta Novitiorum, Lübeck, circa 1475.