Note 273 — Chapter II · THE CONTRIBUTION OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM BEFORE 1100 A. D.

Hist. gentis Langobard., I, 6; (Duhem, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 113–115). It has been thought that Paul the Deacon’s theory of the whirlpools was derived from Norse traditions, but Nansen suggests that it is just as probable that in this case “southern, originally classical ideas ... have been localized in the Norse legends.” Virgil mentions a gulf of the sea “which sucks the water into itself and sends it up again.” Paul the Deacon speaks of whirlpools “not only in the north, and off the Hebrides, but also between Britain and Spain, and in the Strait of Messina.” With Adam of Bremen the whirlpool becomes “exclusively northern, and later still we shall get it even at the North Pole itself” (Nansen, Northern Mists, 1911, vol. i, p. 159).