), in a chapter from the Moralia called 'Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon', describes a land called Ogygia that was five days sail from Britain and that the Celtic natives also knew of three other lands equal distance from Ogygia and from each other in the direction of the setting sun including a 'Great Continent' and 'Land of Cronus' and from the ancient era until the early Christian historical era, geographers referred to the waters beyond Iceland as the ‘Cronian Sea’.
[5][6][7][8][9][10] The following is a translation taken from Mercator's 1569 polar map: "we have taken [the Arctic geography] from the Itinerium of Jacobus Cnoyen of the Hague, who makes some citations from the Gesta of Arthur of Britain; however, the greater and most important part he learned from a certain priest at the court of the king of Norway in 1364.
He was descended in the fifth generation from those whom Arthur had sent to inhabit these lands, and he related that in the year 1360 a certain Minorite, an Englishman from Oxford, a mathematician, went to those islands; and leaving them, advanced still farther by magic arts and mapped out all and measured them by an astrolabe in practically the subjoined figure, as we have learned from Jacobus.
Thorkel Gellisson quoted some Icelanders who had heard Earl Thorfinn of Orkney say that Ari had been recognized in White Man's Land, and couldn't get away from there, but was thought very highly of.The Annals of Greenland, an 11th-century Norse chronicle, says:[13][14] Next to Vinland the Good and a little beyond lies Albania, which is Hvitramannaland.
Irishmen and Icelanders recognized Ari, son of Mar and Thorkatla from Reykjaness, of whom no tidings have been received for a long time and who became a chieftain of the land.White Men's Land is also mentioned in the Saga of Eric the Red, where it is related that the inhabitants of Markland speak of it to Thorfinn Karlsefni.
Then came they to Greenland, and remained with Eirik the Red during the winter.In the Eyrbyggja saga, Gudleif Gudlaugson with his crew had attempted to sail from Dublin to Iceland, but was instead driven out to sea, "first west and then south-west, well out of sight of land".
Although the man did not want to reveal his own identity (reportedly to keep his "kinsmen and blood-brothers" from getting in trouble by trying to visit him), the Norse later took him to have been Bjorn the Breidavik-Champion, who had been exiled from Iceland some thirty years earlier.
[2] In a 16th-century Icelandic text, a chart had apparently been made of the land;[21] Sir Erlend Thordson had obtained from abroad the geographical chart of that Albania, or land of the White men, which is situated opposite Vinland the good, of which mention has been before made in this little book, and which the merchants formerly called Hibernia Major or Great Ireland, and lies, as has been said, to the west of Ireland proper.
[23] Author Farley Mowat proposed that Great Ireland was on the western shore of Newfoundland, in the vicinity of St.George's Bay, and was populated by Papar who had fled first Iceland and then Greenland escaping Norse invaders.
[24] More recent research agrees with the early assessment already proposed by Fridtjof Nansen in 1911 and sees Hvítramannaland as a purely mythological country based on a Norse reception of Irish geographical myths during the Viking Age.