![]() Other ships are half visible and sinking in the outer strands. ![]() The curls form a circle and within this circle is a ship. In a map from that volume, the currents come together like hair curled tightly at the ends. An even better illustration comes from Magnus's history of the Nordic people which was published in Rome in 1555. In the Carta Marina, Olaus Magnus drew the Lofoten chain close to land and the size of a single pea, but there's no mistaking the circular swirl of the great vortex near it. For that's where the legendary Moskstraum rumbled, better known in world literature as the demonic whirlpool of Edgar Allan Poe's story, "Descent into the Maelstrom." The navel of the world, the vortex, the sea-cauldron, the roaring kettle. But what I was traveling to see-to enter, to cross, if I could-were the ocean currents south of Å. Pronounced "Oh," Å was the center of the Lofoten fishing culture for a few centuries, and the whole village had been turned into a museum. In a day or two, I'd be heading for the far southwestern tip of the black sea-bulwark, to a village called Å. It was eight in the evening, July, and freezing cold. It was the work of Olaus Magnus, a Swedish bishop who'd never seen the coast of Norway or the sea, but who populated the waters of the north with serpents and monsters, aquatic versions of Sendak's Wild Things, munching on schooners. For some time I've had on my wall at home a reproduction of the Carta Marina, the first printed map of the Nordic Countries, which appeared in Venice in 1539. Stories, some true, most fantastic, of the north fired the imagination of cartographers. Only fragments remain of his lost book, On the Ocean, including mention of an island called Thule. The geographer Pytheas made a journey northwards around 350 BC. The Greeks mentioned a people, the Hyperboreans, who lived beyond the rule of Boreas, god of the North wind. Querini was fascinated by their custom of drying fish and took great rations of this stoccafisso norvegese back to Venice on the return voyage.īut long before then, this northern sea was known to voyagers and cartographers. ![]() It's from the elegant merchant Pietro Querini that we have some of our first descriptions of sea-girt life on the island near what he called Calo Mundi, the edge of the world: The men of the islands are the most flawless individuals one can imagine they have handsome appearances and their women, too, are beautiful. In January, 1432, a Venetian nobleman and his companions had to abandon their ship for small boats on a voyage to Flanders they drifted helplessly north toward the Arctic until they washed up on a rocky islet just off of R¿st. Faintly, through sea spray, I caught a glimpse of the most remote islands of the chain, Vaer¿y and R¿st. ![]() To the southwest are some of the oldest rocks on earth, remnants of a three-billion-year-old plateau. I braced myself against the railing of the top deck of the coastal steamer, with the wet wind hard on my face. They call it the Lofoten Wall, this island chain that seems to rise up sheer and black out of the Norwegian Sea, frosted with white in winter, emerald green in summer, jagged-spined as a prehistoric beast. Fritz Eichenberg, wood engraving illustrating Edgar Allan Poe's sotry, "A Descent into the Maelstrom." From Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House, 1944). ![]()
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