EUROPE Europe was of course less a land of romance than Asia, but geographical ideas concerning it were crude enough, as a glance at any contemporary map or at the brief and dry catalogue of facts given in the encyclopedic works will show. Isidore, Orosius, and Bede added little to what classical writers had already said. Local mythology tended to creep into the geographical conceptions of the best-known countries and to blur what had been in classical times fairly distinct and clean-cut conceptions. EXPLORATIONS TO THE NORTH In one quarter, however, to the north, the horizon of geographical knowledge was immensely widened. The inner shores of the Baltic, of which the Romans and early Christians had known next to nothing, became from the eighth century familiar ground to the Northmen. Furthermore, the widespread rovings of these adventurous seamen carried them not only westward and southward to harry Britain, France, and Spain and to penetrate into the Mediterranean but also northward along the long stretch of Norwegian coast. Alfred the Great appended to his translation of Orosius an account of the journey in 890 of Othere of Halogaland around the North Cape and into the White Sea even as far as the shores of Biarma Land (near modern Archangel; the word “Biarma” is said to be related to the Russian “Perm”). In later years Norse expeditions visited the remote coasts of Finnmark and Biarma, seeking trade and carrying war and destruction.[317] THE ATLANTIC The maritime wanderings of the early Irish and their successors, the Northmen, gave rise to a circle of legends regarding fabulous islands in the Atlantic and fabulous voyages among them. The poetic imagination of both Kelt and Viking contributed marvelously to the growth of these tales. Great and often misguided ingenuity has been shown in modern times in attempts to find the seeds of truth from which these stories may or may not have sprung.[318] The most famous legend and the one destined to exert the strongest influence on the imagination of the future told of St. Brandan’s journeyings among enchanted isles and fantastic seas to the west and northwest of Ireland. Actual discovery in these quarters is recorded in the pages of the ninth-century Dicuil, who narrates the finding of Thule by Irish priests some thirty years before his time (825 A. D.) and describes the cold of those regions and the long twilights at the time of the summer solstice, when one day merges into the next.[319] The Northmen reached Iceland in 860 and settled there a few years later; Greenland was discovered by them in 877, though it was not colonized until the close of the following century. AMERICA REACHED BY THE NORSEMEN