Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1944, Síða 336

THE HISTORY OF THE MAP OF ICELAND
N. E. Norlund; Islands Kortlcegning. En historísk Fremstilling.
Geodætisk Instituts Publikationer VII. Ejnar Munksgaards Forlag.
Kobenhavn 1944.
During the present war, the Di-
rector of the Danish Geodetic In-
stitute, Professor N. E. Norlund,
ph. d., has issued a series of large
volumes of maps under the general
title of “Publications of the Geo-
detic Institute.” Volume VII of
this series consists of an account,
in words, maps, and pictures, of
the history of the map of Iceland
from the oldest cartographers to the
recent mapping which was com-
pleted in 1944.
The oldest accounts of Iceland,
which go back to oral traditions,
can be traced back to the era of
the earliest settlement, “the Land-
nam,” i. e. the 9th and lOth cen-
turies, but it was not until the
period about 1200 that these tra-
ditions were written down in the
famous Icelandic-Norwegian ma-
nuscripts which till this day are
reckoned among the greatest monu-
ments of Northern civilization. The
copious and astonishingly correct
information about the geography
and people of Iceland contained in
these writtings did not, however,
impinge upon the consciousness of
Western and Southern Europe till
a far later date, and until fairly
recent times there was a striking
contrast between the sober and ex-
act knowledge which Icelanders
possessed of their own country and
the fantastic stories and preposter-
ous fables which constituted the
bulk of the accounts that found
their way into the literature of
Western Europe.
There are no maps in the ancient
Icelandic manuscripts, but on the
other hand they contain certain
sailing directions for the use of
navigators in the Northern waters,
and it is probably these sailing di-
rections which were utilized, —
generally very imperfectly — in the
oldest existing maps containing the
name of Iceland, thus e.g. anAngkz-
Saxon map from the llth or 12th
century and an approximately con-
temporary map by the Arabian
geographer Edrisi. None of the old-
est maps give anything like a cor-
rect picture of the geographical
position of Iceland, let alone its
configuration. This is only found
in maps of a far later date. Even
14th and 15th century maps tell
us little beyond the fact that Ice-
land is an island and that it is si-
tuated somewhere far to the North.
The first real progress was made
by the Danish geographer Claudius
Clavus, who was born in 1388 at
Sallinge in the island of Funen.
Clavus made a name for himself
in the leamed world by making
two maps of North-Western Euro-
pe accompanied by a detailed geo-