The records of the farthest voyages of the Vikings to the shores of Wineland the Good were not given the final written form in which we now know them until after the close of the thirteenth century.[489] On the other hand, the history of Iceland was told by Ari Frodhi (1067–1148) in his _Íslendingabók_;[490] and the chronicles of the settlement of the coasts of this isle and of the discovery of Greenland are recorded in the _Landnámabók_,[491] or _Book of Settlements_, the original of which probably dates from the twelfth century. The famous _Heimskringla_ of Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of early Scandinavian historians, records the history of the kings of Norway. Its title means “the Round World,” and the prelude consists of a brief geographical description of the principal countries of the world. The text includes no less than sixteen Sagas, among them that of Sigurd the Crusader chronicling an adventurous voyage (1109) of a king of southern Norway to the Holy Land by way of the Strait of Gibraltar and homeward overland. Scattered geographical references are found in other Sagas and in the _Icelandic_[492] and _Greenland Annals_[493] which, though written after our period, throw light on events that took place before the mid-thirteenth century. LATIN HISTORIES OF THE NORTH Besides the Sagas, three historical works written in Latin by Northern writers of our age deserve particular mention inasmuch as they all contain geographical descriptions of the Scandinavian world. The first of these is the history of Adam of Bremen. On strictly chronological grounds Adam, who died about 1076, belongs before the opening of the Crusading age. We shall discuss him, however, among the historians of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, to whose works his writings are more akin in spirit than to those of the earlier Middle Ages. Adam was canon of Bremen and master of the cathedral school of that city in the time of the great Archbishop Adalbert, who had “made Bremen an Arctic Rome and his court the greatest center of Northern learning” (Beazley).[494] The archiepiscopal province of Bremen was the largest in the entire medieval church, including all of Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys, the Faroes, and the Hebrides. Adam was thus placed in a most favorable position to gather together materials on the geography and history of these northern lands. His great work (called sometimes _Gesta Hammenburgensis ecclesiae pontificum_, sometimes _Historia ecclesiastica_, and sometimes _Bremensium praesulum historia_) is in four books, the last of which deals with the geography of the North. Much of this was based on information derived from contemporaries; but Adam was also well read in Latin literature and often quotes and copies from the works of Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Solinus, and Orosius.