Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
J.-B. Masculus,
The 1631 eruption
of Vesuvius with
St Januarius, an
engraving of 1633.
Image not available - no digital rights
According to the Icelandic saga
The Flatey Book
, eyewit-
nesses of the 1341 eruption of Hekla saw birds that they took
to be human souls flying into the erupting fire.7 Iceland was
cold and distant, the home of a mysterious people who spoke
an incomprehensible language. From a European perspective,
Iceland was not on the way to anywhere. If travellers sought
warmth, comfort and trading opportunities in the Middle Ages,
they would more profitably travel east and south in Europe, rather
than north and west. The Icelandic Chronicles, according to
Uno von Troil, later the Archbishop of Uppsala, who climbed
Hekla with the young English natural philosopher Joseph Banks
in 1772, listed 63 eruptions in Iceland between 1000 and 1766,
23 of them of Hekla.8
When medieval historians and natural philosophers wrote
about volcanoes, it was either to describe them or to try to divine
some kind of understanding of how they worked. The Oxford
scholar Alexander Neckam (1157-1217) first appears to have
used the word 'Volcano' to describe a place where the earth's fire
burns, though in this instance he used the word as the dative case
of
vulcanus
, meaning '[gives] to Vulcan':
