Wineland == the African islands
A confirmation of the identity of Wineland and the Insulæ Fortunatæ, which in classical legend lay to the west of Africa, occurs in the Icelandic geography (in MSS. of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) which may partly be the work of Abbot Nikulás of Thverá (ob. 1159) (although perhaps not the part here quoted), where we read:
“South of Greenland is ‘Helluland,’ next to it is ‘Markland,’ and then it is not far to ‘Vínland hit Góða,’ which some think to be connected with Africa (and if this be so, then the outer ocean [i.e., the ocean surrounding the disc of the earth] most fall in between Vinland and Markland).”[1]
This idea of the connection with Africa seems to have been general in Iceland; it may appear surprising, but, as will be seen, it finds its natural explanation in the manner here stated. It also appears in Norway. Besides a reference in the “King’s Mirror,” the following passage in the “Historia Norwegiæ” relating to Greenland is of particular importance:
“This country was discovered and settled by the Telensians [i.e., the Icelanders] and strengthened with the Catholic faith; it forms the end of Europe towards the west, nearly touches the African Islands (‘Africanas insulas’), where the returning ocean overflows” [i.e., falls in].
It is clear that “Africanæ Insulæ” is here used directly as a name instead of Wineland, in connection with Markland and Helluland, as in the Icelandic geography. But the African Islands (i.e., originally the Canary Islands) were in fact the Insulæ Fortunatæ, in connection with the Gorgades and the Hesperides; and thus we have here a direct proof that they were looked upon as the same.
The conception of the northern and western
lands and islands in Norse literature.
G. Storm [1890] and A. A. Björnbo [1909, pp. 229, ff.] have sought to explain the connection of Wineland with Africa as an attempt on the part of the Icelandic geographers to unite new discoveries of western lands with the classical-mediæval conceptions of the continents as a continuous disc of earth with an outer surrounding ocean. But even if such “learned” ideas prevailed in Iceland and Norway (cf. the “King’s Mirror”), it would nevertheless be unnatural to unite Africa and Wineland, which lay near Hvítramanna-land, six days’ sail west of Ireland, unless there were other grounds for doing so. Although agreeing on the main point, Dr. Björnbo maintains (in a letter to me) that the Icelanders may have got their continental conception from Isidore himself, who asserted the dogma of the threefold division of the continental circle; and the question whether Wineland was African or not depended upon whether it came south or north of the line running east and west through the Mediterranean. But the same Isidore also described the Insulæ Fortunatæ and other countries as islands in the Ocean, and his dogma could not thus have hindered Wineland from being regarded as an island like other islands (cf. Adam of Bremen’s islands), but why then precisely African? Besides, the Icelandic geography and the Historia Norwegiæ represent two different conceptions, one as a continent, the other as islands. It cannot, therefore, have been Isidore’s continental dogma that caused them both to assume the country to be African. It seems to me that no other explanation is here possible than that given above.
The vine North America