Biography
Adam of Bremen (active c. 1066-1085) was a German cleric of the eleventh century, a canon of Bremen cathedral and master of its school. He is the author of the Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, a history of the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen and of its missionary enterprise in the North. Its fourth book, devoted to the northern lands and islands, is the oldest detailed description of Scandinavia written on the continent, and the first known text to name Vinland, that is, the lands reached by the Scandinavians on the coast of North America.
Almost nothing is known of his life beyond what his own book allows us to guess. He probably came from Meissen, in Saxony, and was no doubt trained at the cathedral school of Magdeburg; the title of magister given to him indicates that he had completed the full course of higher studies. In 1066 or 1067, Archbishop Adalbert called him to Bremen; received among the canons, he was directing the cathedral school in 1069. He died on a 12 October, probably in 1081, in any case before 1085.
The archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen had received from the papacy the task of evangelising the North, from Denmark to Iceland and Greenland. Adalbert had dreamed of making it a northern patriarchate; his death, in 1072, left the province weakened and contested. It was in this context that Adam wrote his work, between about 1073 and 1076, then added to it until his death marginal notes known as scholia. He did not travel in the North. His principal source was a stay at the court of Sweyn Estridsen, king of Denmark, a cultivated man who told him the history of his country and of the neighbouring seas; he also used the archives of Bremen, the testimony of missionaries and merchants, and the ancient authors.
The first three books trace the history of the bishops from the foundation of the see to the episcopate of Adalbert (1043-1072). The fourth, the Descriptio insularum Aquilonis, is a geography: Denmark and its islands, the Baltic and its Slavic shores, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and finally the brief paragraph on Vinland, a land where vines and wild wheat were said to grow. It also contains the most circumstantial description we have of the pagan temple of Uppsala and its sacrifices, pages on the Sámi and on the peoples of the Baltic, and sea routes reckoned in days of sailing. Precise information stands in it alongside bookish traditions inherited from Pliny or Solinus, notably the monstrous peoples placed at the edges of the world.
The text circulated in the Middle Ages in several families of manuscripts. The first printed edition was produced by the Danish canon Anders Sorensen Vedel at Copenhagen in 1579; the manuscript he had used burned in the fire of Copenhagen in 1728, which gives his work a particular value. The critical edition of reference remains that of Bernhard Schmeidler, published in 1917 in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. An English translation by Francis J. Tschan appeared in 1959, a French translation by Jean-Baptiste Brunet-Jailly with Gallimard in 1998. Historians today read Adam with caution, taking into account the interests of his church and his literary models, but his book remains the oldest and most complete written source on the North before the Icelandic sagas, and the excavation of L'Anse aux Meadows, in Newfoundland, has confirmed the reality of the Scandinavian presence in America which he echoed.
