“From Reykjanes on the south side of Iceland it is five [in Hauk’s Landnáma three] dœgr’s sea [i.e., sail] to Jolldulaup in Ireland to the south, but from Langanes on the north side of Iceland it is four dœgr’s sea to Svalbard on the north in Hafsbotn,[148] but it is one dœgr’s sail to the uninhabited parts of Greenland from Kolbeins-ey in the north.”
As will be seen, Svalbard is spoken of, here and in the Annals, as a land that is known. It is also mentioned in Icelandic legendary sagas of the later Middle Ages.
Countries and seas discovered by the Norwegians and Icelanders. The shaded coasts were probably all known
to them. The scale gives “dœgr”-sailing, reckoning 2° (or 120 geographical miles) to each “dœgr’s” sail
The Historia Norwegiæ says of a country in the north:[149]
“But in the north on the other side of Norway towards the east there extend various peoples who are in the toils of heathendom (ah, how sad), namely the Kiriali and Kwæni, horned Finns[150] and both Bjarmas. But what people dwell beyond these we do not know for certain, though when some sailors were trying to sail back from Iceland to Norway, and were driven by contrary winds to the northern regions, they landed at last between the Greenlanders and the Bjarmas, where they asserted that they had found people of extraordinary size and the Land of Virgins (‘virginum terram’), who are said to conceive when they taste water. But Greenland is separated from these by ice-clad skerries (‘scopulis’).”
And in a later passage we read:
“The fourth part [of Norway] is Halogia, whose inhabitants live in great measure with the Finns [Lapps], and trade with them; this land forms the boundary of Norway on the north as far as the place called Wegestaf, which divides it from Bjarmeland (‘Biarmonia’); there is the very deep and northerly gulf which has in it Charybdis, Scylla, and unavoidable whirlpools; there are also ice-covered promontories which plunge into the sea immense masses of ice that have been increased by heaving floods and are frozen together by the winter cold; with these traders often collide against their will, when making for Greenland, and thus they suffer shipwreck and run into danger.”
It may seem probable that this description of a country in the north referred to Svalbard; and the naive allusion to glacier-ice plunging from the land is most likely to be derived from voyagers to the Polar Sea; for it seems less probable that it should be merely information about Greenland transferred to the North. Storm, it is true, dated the Historia Norwegiæ between 1180 and 1190, that is, before the discovery of Svalbard according to the Annals; but later writers place it in the thirteenth century, even as late as 1260 (see vol. i. p. 255). The ideas of the people of great size and of the Land of Virgins are obviously taken from Adam of Bremen, and may be a literary ornament.
Svalbard probably Spitzbergen