Imagining the Baltic: Mental Mapping in the Works of Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus, Eleventh – Thirteenth Centuries

Summary

The Baltic Sea has many names. The various languages spoken on its shores have developed very diverse designations for it. The Germanic languages have simply called it after their geographical directions. Hence, it became Ostsee in German, Østersøen in Danish, or Östersjön in Swedish. The Finnish name for the sea, Itämeri, originally derives from the Swedish hydronym. By contrast, the Estonian Läänemeri translates – somewhat more appropriately for this region – as the ‘Western Sea’. The other peoples along these waters use names that are cognates of how the English know it, too: the Baltic Sea. In Russian, it is called Baltijskoye more (Балтийское моpе), in Latvian Baltijas jūra, in Lithuanian Baltijos jūra, and in Polish Morze Bałtyckie. In addition to these peoples and the English, the ‘Baltic’ name has also been adopted in French, in Spanish, but also in Turkish, Kiswahili, Vietnamese, and, in fact, most languages of the modern world. In European usage, the term ‘Baltic’ has two meanings: apart from the sea, it also denotes a branch of Indo-European languages (namely Latvian and Lithuanian and a few extinct ones) and the countries and peoples living in this ‘Baltic region’ – which commonly include the Estonians, even though their language is of a completely different origin. This linguistic use of the term is rather recent: it was first introduced by the German linguist Ferdinand Nesselmann in 1845. As a name for the sea, it is much older, but it also goes back to a German writer. It was first used in the late eleventh century by Adam of Bremen, in his missionary history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen.

However, in Adam's time, much of the Baltic coastline was not yet explored and many lands on the Baltic Rim were a terra incognita. Hence, the images or ‘mental maps’ a medieval author like Adam had of the ‘Baltic Sea’ must have differed considerably from the modern understanding. While in the early Middle Ages the northern seas were seen as a hostile region, inhabited by pagans and monsters, in the twelfth century, through trade and exploration, writers gained much more detailed geographical knowledge, and geographical descriptions in his time were increasingly independent of ancient (biblical or classical) writing.