As it can hardly be the Christian settlements in Greenland that Saxo refers to as a land without human civilisation, we must doubtless suppose that his land in the north is a confusion of the eastern uninhabited tracts of Greenland with Jotunheimr, as in Icelandic ideas. For Adam of Bremen already had giants (Cyclopes) on an island in the north, and we have seen that there were similar conceptions in the Historia Norwegiæ (cf. [p. 167]).
The tale of Halli Geit
A mediæval Icelandic tale [inserted in Björn Jónsson’s Greenland Annals] says of Halli Geit that
“he alone succeeded in coming by land on foot over mountains and glaciers and all the wastes, and past all the gulfs of the sea to Gandvik and then to Norway. He led with him a goat, and lived on its milk; he often found valleys and narrow openings between the glaciers, so that the goat could feed either on grass or in the woods.”
From the Bayeux tapestry, eleventh century
Land at the North Pole
Ideas of this kind led to the view held by some that there was land as far as the North Pole, which appears in an Icelandic tract, included in the “Rymbegla” [1780, p. 466]. Of a bad Latin verse, there reproduced, it is said:
“Some will understand this to mean that he [i.e., the poet] says that land lies under ‘leidarstjarna’ [the pole star], and that the shores there prevent the ring of the ocean from joining [i.e., around the disc of the earth]; with this certain ancient legends agree, which show that one can go, or that men have gone, on foot from Greenland to Norway.”
The Outer Ocean