Natural Environment in the Old English Orosius: Ohthere’s Travel Accounts in Norway

The Old English travel accounts generally known as Ohthere’s Voyages represent – together with Wulfstan’s travel report – the main historical document and the earliest written geographical description of Northern Europe which has come down to us as interpolation in the late-ninth century Old English translation of Paulus Orosius’s Historiarum adversum Paganos Libri Septem. Ohthere describes three sea journeys, one from his homeland (Halgoland) northward to the White Sea, one southward to the Norwegian port called Sciringes heal, and the last from this port to the Danish trading settlement æt Hæþum. Ohthere’s description of the voyages is enriched with nautical details and with both geographical and ethnographical information on the Norwegian territory, on the peoples he meets (e.g., the Finnas and the Beormas), and on their settlements and ways of living. The accounts have been long studied from both philological and historical points of view, especially from a geographical, nautical, political, and economic angle. The aim of this paper is to investigate Ohthere’s travels from a deeper natural perspective, that is, in their description of the natural environment and of its relationship with people highlighting, on the one hand, the description of rural and agricultural landscapes, i.e., of a nature which can be seen as ‘subordinate’ to human and human activities, and, on the other, the description of wilderness and wastelands with temporary settlements, in order to ascertain whether some depictions can be considered and analyzed as long-term factors (such as, for example, the whale- and walrus-hunting) of present-day conditions and situations.