The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are Read Online Free PDF Page A

used the sea as a symbol of hostile, purifying space, now start to use the
     desert as their metaphor instead. The sea is too busy, too practical; the desert is
     still pure and utterly strange. The sea was beginning to be known. When the mystic
     Hadewijch writes about water in the thirteenth century, she does not see it as the
     terrifying prospect it once was; the abyss is no longer a threat to life or the end
     of the world, for her it is a way to think about the tempestuous nature of God
     himselfand the way you can be lost in
     love. Leviathan has, for the moment, gone away. 27
    There were other monsters still present
     and they travelled. Polar bears and their pelts hardly ever turn up in customs
     records, but the ferocious live beasts were brought to Norway as bribes, and
     successful ones: they even turn up, but not often, at the French and English
     courts. 28 The edgy North had become like Africa and Asia: a distant
     place, a strange place, but a source of wonders that could be known, traded and
     used.
    Take the medieval tale of Audun: a man
     with almost nothing, who had to work and live with relatives in the Westfjords of
     Iceland and had a mother dependent on him. He did have luck, though, and it got him
     a bear. In Iceland almost everything was sold on credit, because people had to be
     able to eat in spring even if the wool and the cloth that they traded for food would
     not be ready until summer. They depended for supplies on sea captains from Norway,
     who had a pressing interest in knowing who was truly creditworthy. Audun helped one
     captain so well that he was offered passage to Greenland. He sold off his sheep to
     support his mother, because by law he had to provide her with enough to take her
     through six seasons – three winters, three summers – and he sailed out. 29
    On Greenland he met a hunter with a
     polar bear that was ‘exceptionally beautiful with red cheeks’. He
     offered the man all the money he had to buy the bear; the man told him that
     wasn’t wise, and Audun said he didn’t care. He wanted to make his mark
     on the world by giving the bear away to a king: a gift as exotic, as rare, as any
     rhinoceros given to a Pope in later centuries.
    Shipping a polar bear for days out at
     sea in a small boat is wild, but not implausible. A bishop on his way from Iceland
     to the mainland to be consecrated took with him ‘a white bear from Greenland
     and the animal was the greatest of treasures’; the beast ended up in the
     Emperor’s menagerie. When Greenlanders wanted a bishop of their own in 1125
     they sent a bear to the King of Norway to encourage him, and the ploy worked. 30 Bears went much further, in fact. King Håkon of Norway sealed his deal with King
     Henry III of Englandwith gifts of
     falcons, furs, whale tusks, a live elk and a live polar bear. 31 The monsters of
     the North start to seem almost domestic; the law in Iceland, where any polar bear at
     all was a rare sight on the floating ice, laid down that ‘if a man has a tame
     white bear then he is to handle it in the same way as a dog’.
    Audun found himself penniless, in the
     middle of a warzone, with a starving bear who could be forgiven for considering his
     minder as lunch; his journey south took so long that even if the bear was a cub in
     Greenland it must have been big and hungry now. The King of Norway offered to buy
     the beast, but Audun refused and kept moving. He made it across to Denmark, but now
     he had quite literally nothing except a bear that was starving to death; a courtier
     offered both of them food, on condition he could own half the bear. Audun had no
     choice.
    This is a story, so naturally the Danish
     king saves Audun and his bear. He pays for Audun to go to Rome and back again, and
     even the King of Norway acknowledges that Audun probably did the right thing when he
     refused to sell him the bear. Norwegian kings gave ships, food and time like Danish
     kings, but not silver; by