Islands

The Cosmographer rounds off his list of names on the British mainland with an overview of the island. He has got his cardinal points wrong by ninety degrees: the Orkneys are to the north, not east, Gaul is to the south, not the west, Ireland to the west, not the north, and Old Germany to the east, not south. This perhaps indicates that the Cosmographer’s map of Britain was a stand-alone, not connected to his source for mainland Europe; the cardinal points do not seem to have been shown on this map and it is possible that Cosmographer oriented it with reference to the direction of most of the writing on it. At any rate, he probably guessed and, being the Cosmographer, guessed wrongly.

The lists of islands that follow this overview are very obscure. Renaming of most islands during the Scandinavian period (if not earlier, during the period of Scottish settlement) has meant that few islands retain names which can be equated with Romano-British forms preserved not only in the Cosmography, but also in Ptolemy and Pliny.