et Quenladiam
intelligi."

and it remains, therefore, to the next commentator, John Reinhold
Forster (the companion navigator with Sir Joseph Banks), to have been
the first to whom we owe the important error. He was praised by Daines
Barrington, for whose edition he gave the notes afterwards reproduced in
his _Northern Voyages of Discovery_; but still with certain
reservations. The honourable translator found some negative evidences
which seemed to militate against the idea that the voyage could have
extended into the arctic circle; for, in such a case, Othere would
hardly have refrained from mentioning the perpetual day of those
regions; the northern lights, which he must have experienced; to which
{178} we add, the perpetual snows, and many other very striking
peculiarities, so new and seemingly inexplicable to a southern traveller
or listener.

Succeeding writers seem to have had fewer scruples, and to have admitted
the idea without consideration. Thorkelin, the Dane, (when in England to
copy out the poem of _Beowulf_ for publication at Copenhagen), gave a
very flattering testimony to Forster's notes, in _Bibliotheca
Topographica_, vol. ix. p. 891. _et seq._, though I believe he
subsequently much modified it. Our own writers who had to remark upon
the subject, Sharon Turner, and Wheaton, in his _History of the
Northmen_, may be excused from concurring in an opinion in which they
had only a verbal interest. Professor Ingram, in his translation of
_Othere's Voyage_ (Oxford, 1807, 4to. p. 96. note), gives the following
rather singular deduction for the appellation: Quenland was the land of
the Amazons; the Amazons were fair and white-faced, therefore _Cwen-Sae_
the White Sea, as Forster had deduced it: and so, having satisfied
himself with this kind of Sorites, follows pretty closely in Forster's
wake. But that continental writers, who took up the investigation
avowedly as indispensable to the earliest history of their native
countries, should have given their concurrence and approval so easily, I
must confess, astonishes me.

Dahlman, whilst Professor of History at Kiel, felt himself called upon
by his situation to edit and explain this work to his countrymen more
detailedly than previously, and at vol. ii. p. 405. of the work cited by
Mr. Singer gives all Alfred's original notices. I shall at present only
mention his interpretation of _Quen Sae_, which he translates
_Weltmeer_; making it equivalent to the prev