SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

226 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
geographers and historians, writing in Latin, popularised
this material throughout Europe.
In I532 the Bavariangeographer Jacob Ziegler published
in Strassburg a collection of essays on different parts of
the world. One of them, Schondia, deals with Norway,
Sweden, Denmark and Finland, and the lands politically
attached to them: Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes and
Shetland. In a preface Ziegler records his sources, a group
of Norwegian and Swedish bishops whom he had met in
Rome, where they were living at the time of the election of
a successor to Pope Adrian VI in I523. Since his sources
were oral and presumably firsthand, Ziegler forms the
first link in a chain of related accounts. For his
description of the Lapones Ziegler seems to have been
indebted to Ioannes Gothum Episcopus (called in the
preface Ioannes Magnus Vpsaliensis) , that is, Iohannes
Magnus, archbishop of Uppsala, brother of the more
famous Olaus Magnus, but himself an amateur of
Scandinavian antiquities. The account of the Lapones
gives an etymology for thejr name to which that of Giles
Fletcher seems related, Vocant uero Germani Lapones, eos
qui parum idonea rei prcesenti dicunt et faciunt. 31 Ziegler
tells of the appearance, education, clothing, way of living,
housing, trading and fishing of the Lapps, their culture of
the reindeer, and ends with details of their idolatrous
practices, which leads naturally to an account of Lapp
witchcraft: incantatores sunt perefficaces. He tells how
they tie three magical knots on a thong. If one is loosed
there arise mild breezes, if two brisker winds, if three an
open storm. The Lapps also make small leaden darts,
which they shoot over great distances. The enemy they
strike dies of a cancerous disease within three days.
Ziegler's lead was followed in I544 by the Rhinelander,
Sebastian Muenster, who published in Basel the first
edition of his Cosmographiae Universalis Libri Sex. This
31]. Ziegler, Qvae intvs continentor . . • Schondia ..• (Argentorati, 1532),
fa. xciiii r.