Norwegian MS. of the Gulathings law. Fourteenth century
This, as we see, is an extremely happy description of the mighty ice-sheet. He also describes the climate of the country, both the fine weather that often occurs in summer, and its usually inclement character, which causes so small a proportion of the country to be habitable.
The glaciers of Greenland a pole of maximum cold
“The land is cold, and the glacier [i.e., the great ice or inland ice] has this nature, that he sends out cold gusts which drive away the showers from his face, and he usually keeps his head bare. But often his near neighbours have to suffer for it, in that all other lands which lie in his neighbourhood get much bad weather from him, and all the cold blasts that he throws off fall upon them.”
Though in simple and everyday words, this really expresses the idea that Greenland and the neighbouring regions are disproportionately cold, and that, in part at any rate, this is due to the glaciers of Greenland, which have a refrigerating effect (as an anticyclonic pole of maximum cold). This is to a certain degree correct. In crossing Greenland in 1888 we found that a pole of cold [anticyclone] lies over the inland ice, which gives off cold air. Scientific greatness does not always depend on erudition or acute learned combinations; it is just as often the result of a sound common-sense.
The allusion in the “King’s Mirror” to the Norse inhabitants of Greenland and their life has already been quoted in part (vol. i. p. 277); curiously enough the Skrælings are not mentioned. The author gives a graphic description of the aurora borealis, and attempts to explain its cause. As already noted ([p. 155]), it is curious that he should speak of it as something peculiar to Greenland, when he must of course have known it well enough in Norway.
The cosmography of the “King’s Mirror” is based on older mediæval writers, especially Isidore. The spherical form of the earth and the course of the sun are mentioned, as is Macrobius’s doctrine of zones. In the frigid zones the cold has attracted to itself such power that the waters throw off their nature and are changed to ice, and all the land and sea is covered with ice. They are usually uninhabitable, but nevertheless the author considers that Greenland lies in the north frigid zone. He thinks that “it is mainland, and connected with other mainland,” as already mentioned, because it has a number of terrestrial animals that are not often found on islands. It
“lies on the extreme side of the world on the north, and he does not think there is land outside ‘Heimskringla’ [the circle of the world, ‘orbis terrarum’] beyond Greenland, only the great ocean which runs round the world; and it is said by men who are wise that the strait through which the empty ocean flows comes in by Greenland, and into the gap between the lands (‘landa-klofi’), and thereafter with fjords and gulfs it divides all countries, where it runs into Heimskringla.”
This is, as we see, the same idea as already ([p. 240]) referred to, that the Outer Ocean runs in through a sound between Greenland and another continent to the south, evidently Wineland, which is thus here again regarded as part of Africa (cf. [p. 1]).
It is moreover striking that neither Wineland, Markland, nor Helluland is mentioned in the “King’s Mirror,” and Bjarmeland, Svalbard, etc., are also omitted. Thus it does not give any complete description of the northern lands, but it must be remembered that what we know of the work is only a fragment, and perhaps it was never completed.