New research suggests that medieval Icelanders were scavenging and likely even hunting blue whales long before industrial whaling technology.
In the fall of 1385, according to a 17th-century Icelandic text, a man named Ólafur went fishing off the northwestern coast of Iceland. In the cold seas cradled by the region’s labyrinthine fjords, Ólafur reportedly came across an animal that would have dwarfed his open wooden boat—a blue whale, the largest animal on record, known in the Icelandic language as steypireyður. Jón Guðmundsson, or Jón the Learned, the poet and scholar who recorded Ólafur’s story, called blue whales the “best and holiest of all whales.” For sailors who were in danger from other, more “evil” whales, Guðmundsson wrote, “it is good to seek shelter with the blue whale, if it is close at hand, and to stay as close to it as possible.” He went on to explain that blue whales were...read more...
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