SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Saga-Book of the Viking Society
compares the situation of his captivity to the description
of the Plutonium in Strabo's Geographica:
Huic propositum est vallum quadratum ambitu fere semiiugero:
quod nebulosa, et crassa caligine plenum est, vt vix solum
discerni possit ad septum appropinquantibus. Aer innoxius
est, purus ab illa caligine in tranquillitate ventorum: nam
caligo intra ambitum manet. Si verb animal introrsum progrediatur,
statim moritur Passeres etiam subito moriuntur.
The last sentence may be the source of Nashe's "incomprehensible
wonders of the bottomlesse Lake Vether, ouer
which no fowle flies but is frozen to death". Olaus
Magnus's chapter has a cross-reference to an earlier
account of the lake, in book I, 27 (the volume is admirably
indexed), which describes the noise made by the thawing
ice. Shortly after, in book II, 2 and 3, Magnus speaks of
the volcanoes of Iceland (with a wood-cut showing Mons
Hekla) , adding, Ibique locus esse creditur pcene, expiationisque
sordidarum animarum. He then tells of the
spirits who take on themselves the forms of the dead, vt
tanquam viuentes accipiantur ab ignaris mortis illorum.
The elements of Nashe's Iceland, described "as I haue
read and heard", can thus be easily found in Olaus
Magnus's Historia. It is likely that Nashe's description
resulted from a hasty reading of, or careless note-taking
from Olaus Magnus's work, and he thus joins Shakespeare
and Marlowe as another of the writers of the early 1590S
to find inspiration in the minor, transient, but interesting
literary theme of Lapland and its sorcerers.