SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

"Lapland Sorcerers" 221
1637, Lapp 1859, Lappish 1875, Lapponic 1890. Several
of these can be antedated, and the NED date for the
commonest, Lapp, is pure fantasy. Lapland can easily be
put back a single year by reference to the title-page of the
1589 edition of R. Hakluyt's The Principall Navigations,
Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation. , which
names Lapland along with Scrikfinia (sic), Corelia and the
Bay of St Nicholas. This suggests a second approach to
the problem, through the literature of the discoveries of
the Elizabethan age, the journeys into Russia from bases
on the White Sea, and the chartering of the Muscovy
Company in 1555.
This travel literature, and the maps which accompany
it, are a rich source of material for antedating NED.19 In
the case of the word Lapland there are sufficient examples
of its appearance before 1590. On the Generall Carde ...
of the Sea Coastes of Europa . . . in Anthony Ashley's
translation of The Mariners Mirrour (undated, but
usually assigned to 1588) Lapland is the name given to the
northern part of Finland, divided by a channel from
Finmarken. G. Best's map in A Trve Discovrse ofthe Late
Voyages of Discouerie (London, 1578) marks Lapland
to the north of Norway. However, Lapland is not the
only name for this country. When Hakluyt is writing on
his own account he calls it Lapland: when he is quoting
earlier writers, right back to Willoughby's diary of 1553,
he uses a variety of other terms. Thus, early sources
give such alternative forms as Lap(p)ia, Lapponia,
Laponie, Lappa (and Finlappia sometimes for an adjacent
area in north Russia), while the people are variously
19 For instance, NED's first example of tundra is dated 1841: but G. Fletcher's
Of the Rvsse Common Wealth . . . (London, 1591), fos. 76v-77r, has the passage,
"The whole countrey in a manner is eyther lakes, or mountaines, which
towardes the Sea side are called Tondro, because they are all of hard and
craggy rocke" (reprinted in E. A. Bond, Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth
Century (1856), roo). A reference, dated 1574, to hides "callid laishe hides",
quoted in T. S. Willan, The Early History of the Russia Company, I553-I603
(1956),135, either antedates NED's losh (1583) or, less likely, gives a sixteenthcentury
reference for NED's lasch, recorded there only in a fifteenth-century
example.