Maelstrom in Norway; the Moskenström
The Historia Norwegiæ places “Charybdis, Scylla, and unavoidable whirlpools” in the north in “Hafsbotn” (cf. later). This must have been a general idea in Norway; for about one hundred years later, in 1360, the Englishman, Nicholas of Lynn, who travelled in Norway in the middle of the fourteenth century, wrote his lost work, “Inventio Fortunata,” on the northern countries and their whirlpools from 53° to the North Pole; but unfortunately we do not know its contents.[128] The conceptions of these whirlpools may doubtless be connected with reports of dangerous currents in the north. The Moskenström by the Lofoten Islands may in particular have given rise to much superstition at an early time. In winter with a westerly wind it runs at a rate of as much as six miles an hour, and with a rising tide it may be altogether impassable. It may set up a high topping sea, which breaks over the whole current so that it can be heard three or four miles off.[129] In later times there are terrifying descriptions of this dangerous current. Thus Olaus Magnus (1555) says that between Roest and Lofoten
“is so great an abyss, or rather Charybdis, that it suddenly swamps and swallows up in an instant those mariners who incautiously approach” (see the illustration, vol. i. p. 158).... “Pieces of wreckage are very seldom thrown up again, and if they come to light, the hard material shows such signs of wear and chafing through being dashed against the rocks, that it looks as if it were covered with rough wool.” And the natural force here manifested exceeds all that is related of Charybdis in Sicily and other wonders.
The Englishman, Anthony Jenkinson, who made a voyage to the White Sea in 1557, writes of it:[130]
“Note that there is between the said Rost Islands & Lofoot, a whirle poole called Malestrand, which from halfe ebbe untill halfe flood, maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the ringes in the doores of the inhabitants houses of the sayd Islands tenne miles off. Also if there commeth any Whale within the current of the same, they make a pitifull crie. Moreover, if great trees be caried into it by force of streams, and after with the ebbe be cast out againe, the ends and boughs of them have bene so beaten, that they are like the stalkes of hempe that is bruised.”
Schönnerböl in 1591 gives a more detailed description of the current, in which the same things are reported
of the iron ring “in the house door ... it is shaken hither and thither by the rushing of the current”; of the whale, who when “he cannot go forward on account of the strong stream, gives a great cry, as it were a great ox, and then he is gone...”; and, finally, of great trees, spruce or fir, which disappear in this current, and when at last they come up again, “then all the boughs, all the roots and all the bark is torn off, and it is shaped as though it had been cut with a sharp axe.” He says that “many people are of the opinion that there is a whirlpool in this current or immediately outside it”; and “when the stream is strongest, one can see the sun and the sky through the waves, since they go as high as other high mountains.”[131]
Peder Claussön Friis gives a similarly exaggerated description of the current (circa 1613), sometimes using the same expressions as the authors quoted. The resemblance between these various descriptions is so great that it cannot easily be explained merely by their reporting the same oral tradition; what they have in common must rather be derived from an older written source (Nicholas of Lynn ?), which again has adopted ancient mythical conceptions. It is strange how few more recent ideas have been added even in Schönneböl, who was sheriff of Lofoten and Vesterålen for at least twenty years (from 1570), and must have had plenty of opportunity for gathering information on the spot; but it is the usual experience that everything that could be got from old books was preferred. That stories of the Moskenström may have been known in Adam of Bremen’s time is highly probable, perhaps even Paulus Warnefridi had heard of it (cf. vol. i. p. 158).
Possible truth in Harold’s ocean voyage
When we have shorn Adam’s tale of all borrowed features, is there enough left to make it possible that the Norwegian king Harold undertook a voyage out into the ocean? It is not easy to form a definite opinion on this, but the probability must be that King Svein or the Danes told some such story, which was then adorned by Master Adam. As the voyage was supposed to have taken place recently, it must be Harold Hardråde who was intended, otherwise one might be led to think of Harold Gråfeld’s celebrated voyage to Bjarmeland.[132] What the object may have been, and what direction the voyage took, we do not know. As Adam says it was to explore “the breadth of the northern ocean” (“latitudinem septentrionalis oceani”), one must suppose that in his opinion it set out from Norway northward or north-westward over the ocean towards its uttermost limit, since according to the maps and ideas of that time he imagined the ocean as surrounding the disc of the earth like a ribbon (see vol. i. p. 199), and he may then have sailed across this to find out its extent.[133] But it is quite possible, as P. A. Munch [1852, ii. pp. 269, ff.] suggested, that Master Adam may have heard something about a northward voyage undertaken by Harold, during which he had been exposed to some danger in the Saltström or the Moskenström;[134] or if it was a voyage to Bjarmeland (Harold Gråfeld’s ?) that he heard of, then it might be the current at Sviatoi Nos or Straumneskinn, often spoken of in the sagas, that Adam has made into the whirlpool.