same language, but between his home and this Biarmaland no
human being lived in any fixed dwelling, and all the Northman's land was
long and narrow and thinly peopled, decreasing in breadth as it
stretched northward, from sixty to three days' journey.

Again Alfred told how Ohthere, sailing south for a month from his house,
having _Ireland_ on his right and coasting Norway all the time on his
left, came to Jutland, "where a great sea runs up into the land, so vast
that no man can see across it," whence in five days more he reached the
coast, "from which the English came to Britain."

Wulfstan, in the service of the same king, told him how he sailed in
seven days from Sleswick to Truso and the Vistula, having Wendland (or
Pomerania and Prussia) on his right all the way. He described "Witland
near the Vistula and Estland and Wendland and Estmere and the Ilfing
running from the Truso lake into Eastmere," but neither the king nor his
captains knew enough to contradict the old idea, found in Ptolemy and
Strabo, of Scandinavia as one vast island.

Thus it was for the satisfaction of their Saxon Lord that Wulfstan and
Ohthere, by their voyages along the coasts of Norway and Lapland, of
Pomerania and Prussia, round the White Sea and the Gulf of Riga and
southern Finland, added a more coherent view of north-east Europe, and
specially of the Baltic Gulf, to Western geography; but these Norse
discoveries, though in the service of an English king, were scarcely
used save by Norsemen, and they must partly go to the credit of Vikings,
as well as of Alfred the Great. Thus in 965 King Harold Grayskin of
Norway "went and fought with the folk on the banks of the Dwina," and
plundered them, and in 1026 Thorer Hund joined himself to a fleet sent
by St. Olaf to the White Sea, pillaged the temple of the idol Jomala,
and destroyed his countrymen by treachery on their way home. Where two
expeditions are recorded they may well stand for twenty unknown and
uneventful ones, and the same must be equally granted as to the gradual
advance of knowledge through the unceasing attacks of the Norse kings
and pirates on the lands to the south of the Baltic, where lived the
Wends.

Thus on the west and east, north-west and north-east, the Northmen could
and did make a definite advance into the unknown; even the south-west
lines of Northern invasion and settlement, though they hardly yield any
general results to discovery, certainly led to a more thorou