Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 Read Online Free

bypassed hostile Carthaginian territory by travelling overland from Massalia to the Bay of Biscay and there chartered a ship from one of the local Celtic tribes to take him on to Britain. The Veneti of Brittany were particularly well-known for building sturdy wooden sailing ships with which they carried on a brisk trade in tin with Britain. Pytheas landed at Belerion – Land’s End – and travelled the whole length of Britain. Everything the Greeks knew about Britain up until then was based on hearsay. For the first time Pytheas added some reliable facts. His estimate of Britain’s circumference as around 40,000 stades, approximately 4,500 miles, is remarkably close to the actual distance of around 4,700 miles. The next stage of Pytheas’ journey took him far beyond the edge of the known world. Setting out from an unidentified island off Britain’s north coast, Pytheas sailed north for six days until he reached the land he called Thule. Pytheas’ observation that the sun was below the horizon for only two or three hours at midsummer fixes Thule’s latitude at about 64° north. However, Pytheas had no means of calculating longitude.There is no doubt that Thule was a land in the far north but where exactly? The uncertainty of its location has made Thule more a symbol of ultimate hyperborean remoteness than a real place.
    Iceland or even Greenland have been proposed as possible locations for Thule but, as this comment on Pytheas’ account by the Greek geographer Strabo ( c. 63/64 BC – AD 24) makes clear, Thule was inhabited by farming peoples:
‘[Pytheas] might possibly seem to have made adequate use of the facts as regards the people who live close to the frozen zone, when he says that, the people live on millet and other herbs, and on fruits and roots; and where there are grain and honey, the people get their beverage, also, from them. As for the grain, he says, since they have no pure sunshine, that they pound it out in large storehouses, after first gathering in the ears thither; for the threshing floors become useless because of this lack of sunshine and because of the rains.’ The Geography of Strabo, bk IV 5.5 (Loeb Classics, 1917).
    Greenland was inhabited only by early Inuit hunter-gatherers at this time, and Iceland by no one at all, so neither could have been Pytheas’ Thule. This means that Pytheas’ landfall must have been somewhere around Trondheim Fjord on Norway’s west coast. Despite its northerly latitude, the Norwegian coast has a relatively mild climate thanks to the influence of the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream current, which makes farming possible even north of the Arctic Circle. Trondheim Fjord’s sheltered south and east shores have some of Norway’s most fertile soils and farmers were settled on them as early as 2800 BC . Pytheas sailed still further north and his observations make it clear that he crossed the Arctic Circle. He also claimed that a day’s sail north of Thule was the Frozen Sea, though it is not clear if he actually saw this for himself or merely reported what other seafarers had told him.
    Following his visit to Thule, Pytheas headed south to explore the Baltic, which he must have reached via the Skagerrak, the Kattegat and one of the passages through the Danish islands. Pytheas visited the unidentified island of Abalus from whose shores amber was collected. A translucent fossil resin with a fiery colour, amber had been prized in the Mediterranean world for thousands of years, not only because of its beauty but because of its seemingly magical electrostatic properties: called electrum by the Greeks, amber has given us the word ‘electricity’. The origins of amber were the subject of several myths but Pytheas was the first to establish its true source. Abalus has been identified as the Danish islands of Sjælland or Bornholm, the Samland peninsula near Kaliningrad (the richest source of amber today), and the North Sea island of Heligoland. Heligoland seems unlikely as