The relationship between geographical information in the Old English Orosius and Latin texts other than Orosius

A great deal has been written about the geographical first chapter of the Old English Orosius since it attracted the attention of scholars in the sixteenth century. Not only has this chapter been a valuable source of information for historians and historical geographers, but also it has proved a fertile subject for speculation, particularly as regards the origins and accuracy of the modifications made in it to its Latin original. Most discussions have been concerned exclusively with the apparently independent section on the geography of Germania. Recently, however, a theory has gained favour which requires all the ‘new’ geographical information in this work to be taken into consideration: the theory that, to help him in his translation and adaptation, the author may have used a mappa mundi, a traditional map portraying the orbis terrarum of classical geographers. Thus Professor Labuda considers the source of certain additional details, such as the association of the Sabaei with Arabia Eudaemon and the location of the legendary Land of Women and Riphaean mountains north of the ninth-century Croats of Bohemia, to be a mappa mundi on which the author marked the positions of Germanic, Slav and Baltic countries. Dr Havlík and Professor Derolez suggest that the apparent clockwise deviation of a number of directions in Or. may similarly be due to the use of an enlarged mappa mundi. According to them, the author of Or. would seem to have described the relative positions of peoples and countries from the standpoint not of astrological north, south, east and west, but of cartographic oriens (near the mouth of the Ganges), meridies (south of the Nile), occidens (near the Pillars of Hercules) and septentrio (in the region of the river Tanais). Thus, for instance, the Abodriti, whose ‘centre’, Mecklenburg, was true north-east of the Old Saxons, are cartographic north of them, by virtue of their location on an imaginary line between Saxonia and septentrio. Finally, Dr Linderski, on the basis of possible classical sources that he has found for Or.'s siting of Dacia east of the Vistula and placing of an unnamed waste-land between Carentania and Bulgaria, has suggested that if the author did indeed use such a map – an alternative being a ‘description’ – it was almost certainly a late offspring of the Commentarii of Agrippa and his now lost mappa mundi.