SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

220 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
usually connected with the sorceries of the Finnar. The
only manuscript of the Historia, a fifteenth-century one
from the Orkneys, remained unpublished until its
discovery in Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century, so
again Shakespeare would not have had access to its
material. The Lapland sorcerers were not in the sources
of Shakespeare's plot. Ephesus was a noted centre of
witchcraft from New Testament times.!" and the reference
to Lapland is Shakespeare's addition. Where did it come
from?
An approach to this problem is suggested by the New
English Dictionary. That work is inconsistent in its
treatment of geographical names, but its entry under
Lapland illustrates the word both as attributive adjective
and proper noun. For the first recorded appearance of
Lapland it quotes (with the date c. 1590) Marlowe's The
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, I i, "Like ... Lapland
Gyants, trotting by our sides". NED notes that Lapland
is "the fabled home of witches and magicians" The
extensive list of quotations given from the seventeenth
century consists mainly of references to magic, principally
that of controlling the winds, though E. Seaton's more
detailed examination of the material from that century
shows the wider range of sorcery attributed to the Lapps
- shape-shifting, moving objects across great distances,
employment of familiars, shooting of lappskot, and so on.!"
The Faustus reference to Lapland can be little earlier than
that in The Comedy of Errors. Indeed, it may even be
later, for neither play can be precisely dated.l"
The derivatives of Lapland are given widely differing
dates in NED: Lappian 1599, Lapponian 1607, Laplander
1. R. A. Foakes, The Comedy of Errors (1962), II3-15; G. Bullough, Narrative
and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (1957), 10.
17 E. Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia in the Seventeenth
Century (1935), 275 fl.
" Doctor Faustus is usually thought to be earlier than The Comedy of Errors,
but for discussions of the dates of the plays which allow possible precedence to
Shakespeare's comedy see w. w. Greg, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616
(1950), 5-10, and Foakes, Comedy of Errors, xvi-xxiii.