[223]. Also called the harp seal: Phoca Grœnlandica.
[224]. This observation accords with modern scientific classification.
[225]. In the thirteenth century, the century of the King’s Mirror, falconry was a favorite sport of the European nobility and there seems to have been some demand for Norwegian hawks. In the Close Rolls of the reign of Henry III there are allusions to gifts of hawks sent by the king of Norway to the English king. See above p. 29.
[226]. The diocese of Gardar in Greenland was established about 1110. For an account of the Norwegian colony in Greenland see Gjerset, History of the Norwegian People, I, 197-204.
[227]. Cf. the papal letter of Alexander VI, written in 1492. Olson and Bourne, The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 73-74.
[228]. We should infer from the form of this question and from the later discussion of the northern lights that this phenomenon was not prominent in Norway in the thirteenth century. There seem to be periods when these “lights” are less in evidence than at other times. But it should also be noted that the author discusses whales in connection with Greenland and Iceland only, though it is extremely likely that whales were not unknown on the shores of Norway.
[229]. The “home-circle” (kringla heimsins) was the Old Norse translation for the Latin orbis terrae, orb of the earth.
[230]. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) discusses the five zones in his Etymologiae, iii, c. xliv; xiii, c. vi; and in his De Natura Rerum, c. x. The editors of the Sorö edition suggest that the “other learned men” may be Macrobius and Martianus Capella, the famous encyclopedists of the fifth century (p. 195). But as these writers preceded Isidore by nearly two centuries, it is unlikely that their works were more than indirect sources for the scientific statements in the Speculum Regale. It is more probable that the reference is to such writers as Bede, Rabanus Maurus, and Honorius of Autun, though it is impossible to specify what authority was followed.
[231]. By glacier the author evidently means the great inland ice masses. On the effect of this inland ice on the climate of Greenland and neighboring regions, see Nansen, In Northern Mists, II, 247.
[232]. Cf. Macrobius, 601. “... for both the northern and the southern extremities lie stiff with perpetual frost, and they are like two zones with which the earth is girdled, but narrow as if they were circlets drawn about the farthest regions.”