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Great Ireland (Old Norse: Írland hit mikla or Írland it mikla), also known as White Men's Land ( Hvítramannaland) or Land of the White People, (2026). 9782503597713 ISBN 9782503597713
and in Latin similarly as Hibernia Major and Albania, was a land said by various Norsemen to be located near Vinland.Barnes, 2001, p. 31. In one report, in the Saga of Eric the Red, some skrælingar captured in Markland described the people in what was supposedly White Men's Land, to have been "dressed in white garments, uttered loud cries, bore long poles, and wore fringes." Another report identifies it with the Albani people, with "hair and skin as white as snow."
Scholars and writers disagree on the nature of the land, from either being treated as a myth based on faded knowledge of lands in the western ocean, to theories on actually locating it somewhere in North America.
Plutarch (1st cent.), in a chapter from the Moralia called 'Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon', describes a land called Ogygia that was five days sail from Britain and that the Celtic natives also knew of three other lands equal distance from Ogygia and from each other in the direction of the setting sun including a 'Great Continent' and 'Land of Cronus' and from the ancient era until the early Christian historical era, geographers referred to the waters beyond Iceland as the ‘Cronian Sea’.Plutarch, Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon, chap. 26.
Irish documents called ‘Immrama’ from the 6th and 7th centuries supposedly record the adventures of Irish priests in the western ocean, while other folkloric stories tell of the Atlantic voyages of Saint Brendan and King Arthur, often considered mythical. Gerardus Mercator refers to a Jacob Cnoyen, who had learned that eight men returned to Norway from an expedition to the Arctic islands in 1364, in a letter to John Dee (1577), stating specifically that the eight men who came to Norway in 1364 were not survivors of a recent expedition, but descended from the colonists who had settled the distant lands several generations earlier and claimed to be descendants of King Arthur's expedition. (2003). 9780801875472, Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. ISBN 9780801875472
The following is a translation taken from Mercator's 1569 polar map:
"we have taken the from the Itinerium of Jacobus Cnoyen of the Hague, who makes some citations from the Gesta of Arthur of Britain; however, the greater and most important part he learned from a certain priest at the court of the king of Norway in 1364. He was descended in the fifth generation from those whom Arthur had sent to inhabit these lands, and he related that in the year 1360 a certain Minorite, an Englishman from Oxford, a mathematician, went to those islands; and leaving them, advanced still farther by magic arts and mapped out all and measured them by an astrolabe in practically the subjoined figure, as we have learned from Jacobus. The four canals there pictured he said flow with such current to the inner whirlpool, that if vessels once enter they cannot be driven back by wind."
Their son was Ari, who drifted to White Men's Land, which some people call Greater Ireland. It lies in the ocean to westward, near Vineland the Good, said to be a six-day sail west from Ireland. Ari couldn't get away, and was baptized there. This story was first told by Hrafn Limerick-Farer who spent a long time at Limerick in Ireland. Thorkel Gellisson quoted some Icelanders who had heard Earl Thorfinn of Orkney say that Ari had been recognized in White Man's Land, and couldn't get away from there, but was thought very highly of.
Next to Vinland the Good and a little beyond lies Albania, which is Hvitramannaland. Thither formerly were sailings from Ireland. Irishmen and Icelanders recognized Ari, son of Mar and Thorkatla from Reykjaness, of whom no tidings have been received for a long time and who became a chieftain of the land.
Now, when they sailed from Vinland, they had a southern wind, and reached Markland, and found five Skrælingar; one was a bearded man, two were women, two children. Karlsefni's people caught the children, but the others escaped and sunk down into the earth. And they took the children with them, and taught them their speech, and they were baptized. The children called their mother Vætilldi, and their father Uvægi. They said that kings ruled over the land of the Skrælingar, one of whom was called Avalldamon, and the other Valldidida. They said also that there were no houses, and the people lived in caves or holes. They said, moreover, that there was a land on the other side over against their land, and the people there were dressed in white garments, uttered loud cries, bore long poles, and wore fringes. This was supposed to be Hvitramannaland (White Man's Land). Then came they to Greenland, and remained with Eirik the Red during the winter.
The described circumstances in this report have led some to connect it with Great Ireland, although the Eyrbyggja saga does not make this explicit identification.Reeves et al., 1906, p. 272-277. The voyage is thought to have taken place in 1029.
Sir Erlend Thordson had obtained from abroad the geographical chart of that Albania, or land of the White men, which is situated opposite Vinland the good, of which mention has been before made in this little book, and which the merchants formerly called Hibernia Major or Great Ireland, and lies, as has been said, to the west of Ireland proper. This chart had held accurately all those tracts of land, and the boundaries of Markland, Einfœtingjaland, and Helluland, together with Greenland, to the west of it, where apparently begins the good Terra Florida.
Carl Christian Rafn positioned Great Ireland in Chesapeake Bay. Rafn based his identification on Shawnee Amerindian legends of a race described as "white men who used iron instruments". These legends he connected to the description of the inhabitants of Greater Ireland as being white people who carried poles.Rafn, 1841, p. 209.
Other sources place Great Ireland in Newfoundland, Canada.Barnes, 2001, p. 31 (footnote). Author Farley Mowat proposed that Great Ireland was on the western shore of Newfoundland, in the vicinity of St. George's Bay, and was populated by Papar who had fled first Iceland and then Greenland escaping Norse invaders.Mowat, 1998
More recent research agrees with the early assessment already proposed by Fridtjof Nansen in 1911 and sees Hvítramannaland as a purely mythological country based on a Norse reception of Irish geographical myths during the Viking Age.Egeler, Matthias (2015): "Hvítramannaland," in: Heinrich Beck; Sebastian Brather; Dieter Geuenich; Wilhelm Heizmann; Steffen Patzold; Heiko Steuer (eds.): Germanische Altertumskunde Online (GAO). Berlin – Boston: de Gruyter (2015). DOI: 10.1515/gao_49; Fridtjof Nansen: In Northern Mists. Arctic Exploration in Early Times. Translated by Arthur G. Chater. 2 volumes, London: William Heinemann 1911.
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