The Description of the Northern Islands

Around 1075, in his scriptorium at Bremen, a canon of the archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen who has never seen the open sea sets out to map the ends of the earth. He has scarcely traveled beyond the mouth of the Elbe, yet he means to fix on parchment everything that lies farther north, where no cleric of his rank has ever set foot.

Adam of Bremen never traveled to the lands he describes. But he questioned the kings, sailors, and missionaries who returned from the North, and from their words he drew the oldest written description of the Nordic world. Across his pages pass the Danish kings who slaughter one another for the throne, the Ascoman pirates who ransom the Baltic Sea, the golden temple of Uppsala where the bodies of the sacrificed hang from its sacred trees, and the missionaries who smash idols at the risk of their lives. His instrument is not the sail but the ear: above all he gains the ear of a king, Sweyn Estridsson, the living memory of the North, who entrusts him with kingdoms, battles, and shipwrecks as an inheritance to be set down for posterity.

Then the narrative races toward the edges of the world: Iceland, where the ice itself seems to catch fire; Greenland, land of men turned blue by the salt spray of the northern seas; and that distant country where the vine grows wild of its own accord, Vinland, whose name Adam is the first writer in history to set down on parchment, nine centuries before archaeological excavations would prove him right. Beyond even Vinland opens the gulf of darkness, the place where, in the geography of Adam's century, the known world comes to its end.

The first written portrait of Scandinavia, Iceland, and the threshold of America, this unique eleventh-century testimony blends the most surprising factual accuracy with pure marvel, often within the same page. No complete English translation of this text had previously been made available to the general reading public.

The present edition modernizes the text based on the Latin critical edition by Lappenberg and Waitz (Hanover, 1876), collated against the later Schmeidler edition, and brings together the Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis, the fourth and final book of the Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, with selected passages from the chronicles of the kings and the missions of the North drawn from Books II and III. The whole is reorganized into twenty continuous chapters, and Adam's own marginal scholia are preserved throughout. This edition is illustrated with eighteen engravings, accompanied by ten original maps, a glossary of Nordic terms, a detailed chronology of the events described, and a double index of characters and places.