SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Scandinavicafor the 18th-century Common Reader 237
The Monthly Review l l published long extracts - over
40 pages in all - from a translation of Bishop Erik
Pontoppidari's N atural History of Norway, originally
written in Danish. The Review thinks he could not
suppose foreigners much acquainted with the great
variety of the inanimate and living productions of nature
in Norway, since the country "is seldom visited but by
traders and seamen". (Times change: most eighteenthcentury
tourists distrusted mountainous country.) The
book, with its plates, is expensive, so the Review gives
generous treatment to passages concerning Pontoppidan's
attempt to explain the Northern Lights, his comments
on the Norwegian climate, including that by-word the
rain at Bergen, the effect of the Gulf Stream on the
western coasts, though the Bishop might not have recognised
it under that name, the nature of the soil,
avalanches, minerals, the strange formations at Torghatten,
and the Maelstrom. The reviewers were grateful
to Providence that they had been allotted "a more secure
and comfortable situation". Details of agriculture,
horticulture and forestry follow, with a note on reindeer
living on mosses. Later extracts concern beasts, birds
and fishes. This leads to a discussion of some strange
fauna: the bishop reports that people are half inclined
to believe in Mer-men, including one reported by a
minister of 'Sundmoer' who saw one and described it as
grey in colour - "the lower part like a fish, with a
porpoise's tail. The face resembled a man's, with a
mouth, forehead, eyes, etc. The nose was flat and
pressed down to the face, in which the nostrils were very
visible." And the sea-serpent and the kraken? It
seems the peasantry believed in both, and the Bishop was
inclined to bring forward evidence to support them, and
the Review was willing to suspend judgment.
The "rational inhabitants" were industrious, handy
and ingenious, excellent wood carvers, polite, faithful,
II Monthly Review XII (1755). 447-62. 493. 506; XIII (1756). 35-49.
K