It is charted in the pages of Utopia, Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels; the fact that all are fiction has not mitigated the effect. Islanders pride themselves on their ability to travel through inhospitable regions of the earth. When Abbot Brendan and his cohort of monks sailed across the cold and lonely ocean, “and all the while they had nothing to look at but the sea and the sky,” 1 they are anticipating the plight of English seafarers everywhere; in particular they are the harbingers of The Ancient Mariner. One of the earliest travel books in the English language was written between 754 and 768, and related the journey of Willibald to Jerusalem. In a sea-locked island such expeditions smack of the marvellous. That is why the Norwegian Ohthere and the Dane Wulfstan were taken to King Alfred’s court, so that they could inform him at first hand of their adventures in the White and Baltic Seas. There are beasts called reindeer in the land of the Lapps; in Estonia the dead are “refrigerated”
