11/3/2023 0 Comments Norway whirlpool![]() Guthrie extols the “wonderful animals which, according to some modern accounts, inhabit the Norwegian seas.” Among those creatures is the “sea-snake. What Scott is referring to here is William Guthrie’s Norway chapter in A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World (published in multiple editions following the death of the author in 1770). ![]() Writing during the Enlightenment, Pontoppidan condescendingly––and rather hypocritically––charges that in writing about the sea serpent, Olaus “mixes truth and fable together, according to the relations of others but this was excusable in that dark age when that author wrote.” He adds, though, that, “Notwithstanding all this, we in the present more enlighten’d age are much obliged to him, for his industry, and judicious observations.” He then quotes Olaus’ discredited description of the Great Norway Serpent. ![]() Initially skeptical of sea-serpent tales, the bishop was ultimately convinced of their existence by “full and sufficient evidence from creditable and experienced fishermen, and sailors, in Norway, who can testify that they have annually seen them.” While he respectfully cites Olaus’ History in earlier pages of his volumes, his assessment of the book’s credibility when it comes to sea monsters is a different matter. Pontoppidan devotes Chapter 8 of the second volume (1753) of his Natural History of Norway to reports of sea monsters and other strange animals of the deep. Olaus’ account of the Sea Orm, largely accepted into the early seventeenth century, is challenged a century later by Erich Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen. Created to show the rest of Europe the rich history, culture, and natural wonders of the North prior to the Reformation, the map was printed in Venice twelve years later. A Catholic priest exiled with his Archbishop of Uppsala brother, Johannes, from their native Sweden after it converted to Lutheranism, Olaus began compiling the nationalistic map in Poland in 1527. The wall map, measuring about 5 feet (1.5m) wide and 4 feet (1.2m) high, was the largest, most accurate, and most detailed map of Scandinavia––or of any European region––at that time. A second copy surfaced in 1962 and is now in the Uppsala University Library. After it went out of circulation by the 1580s, it was lost for three centuries until a copy was discovered in the Munich state library in 1886, shortly before publication of The Great Sea-Serpent. While Oudemans cites natural histories in which copies or variations of Gesner’s famous woodcut of Olaus’ sea serpent appear, his list does not refer to the monster’s iconic source: the 1539 Carta Marina.
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