Yggdrasil · Humankind

Ohthere: A Northerner Describes His World

A Norse chieftain tells King Alfred of his herds, northern payments and voyages in an Old English report.

Myth and literature · Quotation

In Thorpe’s translation

He was a very wealthy man in those possessions in which their wealth consists, that is in wild deer. He had at the time he came to the king, six hundred unsold tame deer. These deer they call rein-deer, of which there were six decoy rein-deer, which are very valuable amongst the Fins, because they catch the wild rein-deer with them. He was one of the first men in that country, yet he had not more than twenty horned cattle, and twenty sheep, and twenty swine, and the little that he ploughed he ploughed with horses.

Myth and literature

The story

Near-contemporary travel account: a written report, in Old English, of what a northern traveller said about his own life, set down in the late ninth century.

Ohthere, who is also called Ottar, told King Alfred of England that he lived farther north than any other Northman, in a land called Hálogaland. Most of the land beyond him, he said, was waste, with a few people hunting in winter and fishing in summer. He wanted to learn how far it reached, so he sailed north, then east, then south, and came to a great river. He also described the voyage south to a trading place, and he told the king about the walrus, whose teeth were valuable and whose hides made good rope. He counted his own wealth in reindeer, with few cattle and little ploughing, and he said most of his riches came from payments made to him by the people the text calls Finnas.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: that a man of the far north called himself the northernmost of the Northmen, that he reckoned wealth in tame reindeer and decoy deer, that he owned few farm animals, that walrus teeth and hide, whale hunting and payments from the Finnas added to his standing, and that he sailed both to the north and to the south. All of this is given in his own words, as relayed in Old English.

What is not recorded: where his home stood, what he believed, what gods he honoured or how he spoke of them. The text says nothing of religion. The scale of the numbers, the exact route of the northern voyage and the places named have been debated by scholars, and the text is a court record of a spoken report, not Ohthere’s own writing.

Historical evidence

The evidence

The account survives inside the Old English version of the History against the Pagans by Orosius, made in the circle of King Alfred, who ruled Wessex until 899. In it Ohthere speaks to the king and is followed by a similar report from a traveller named Wulfstan. The Wikipedia article gives the date as about 890 and lists two nearly complete manuscripts, one of them Cotton Tiberius B.i in the British Library, written in the early eleventh century, with fragments elsewhere. This entry reads the English translation by B. Thorpe, printed in 1853 and now in the public domain. The Old English is the surviving record, and the figures it gives, such as the number of animals, have been debated. Where places are named, such as the trading port Sciringes heal, identifying them with modern sites is a matter of scholarly argument.