English
But what if water does not stand for oblivion but is the very elixir of life, the way seas are. Writing in water, like writing on any washable surface, is the art of trying ever different takes on things. Think of that infinitely renewable surface of black- or whiteboard in the classroom. You wipe it clean with a sponge and it is ever ready to teach you new things — a clean slate, a tabula rasa. Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke, writer and translator, has put together a heavyweight anthology of texts from the last two thousand years related to the Baltic Sea. Die Ostsee [The Baltic Sea] provides legions of versions of life by this sea, and with a quote from Herder — who figures prominently in the book — it’s good to set out on this sea as something generic, above politics, an unnamed element:
“wie unsre Schiffahrt geht, ists nur überall Meer”.
[The way our ships sail, it’s the same sea all around]
Water, of course, is also something we use for baptism and rebaptizing. Places and things have been constantly named and renamed on and around the Baltic Sea, by residents, visitors, and intruders. Many political powers around this sea have enjoyed a period of greatness at some time in their history. As Max Fürst, a son of Königsberg, writes here of the sometime realm of Lithuania:
“Es scheint, dass Gott gerecht ist und jedem Volk einmal seine Geschichtsstunde gewährt hat, worauf dann ewige Ansprüche angemeldet werden.”
[It would seem that God is just and has granted each nation its hour of fame, for which claims are then made in perpetuity].
Most realms get a mere fifteen minutes of fame, yet some go on suffering from phantom pains.
Sweden was one of these powers, and a specifically Baltic one. From the peace of Westphalia up to the demise of Charles XII, and even beyond, Sweden liked to view the Baltic as its mare nostrum, a Swedish lake — der Ostsee? — and a Mediterranean of the north. And of course it smarts to give up a mare nostrum; it was painful for Rome once. Sweden, we know, didn’t renounce its claims to the city of Wismar until the early 20th century. Downsizing takes time.
Worldly powers wield their might over names too, and cities along the coast have changed their names as rulers have changed. Reading Die Ostsee there seems to be something particularly unstable about seas. They are such stuff as tall tales and sailor’s yarns are made of, everchanging, stormy or sedate, enthralling, unpredictable, capricious. All of this comes across in the book in stories about shipwrecks, near-shipwrecks, piloting ordeals, risky fishing expeditions, post-war extraditions, etc.
The Baltic Sea in Liedtke’s portrayal has a thousand faces; it is a wonder of relativity. It is even relative to the way you face it. In Germanic languages the Baltic is called the East Sea, as opposed presumably to the North Sea, which lies west of the East Sea, and lies to the south of, for instance, Norway. Norway thus faces south towards a north sea — but then again its name was the Anglo-Saxon way of referring to the way leading to the north. When Danes look west from Jutland they refer, with Danish gusto, to the North Sea as the West Sea. Estonians also talk about the West Sea (Läänemeri), but what they mean is the Baltic, the Baltic being their west sea. And there is no telling where their west sea meets with the Germanic east sea. The borders of the Baltic are writ in water; no limen is visible.
This recountal reminds us that names entail a perspective. In seafarers’ language, names are moored in historical change, as when Königsberg becomes Kaliningrad, or Stettin Szczecin, or Arensburg Kuressaare. Linguists have a category for this, they talk about deixis, or deictic words. A deictic is a digit, Greek for finger. Not only does it, like a finger, point in a certain direction, it also has a pointer, someone to whom this finger belongs. A deictic is always situated: its meaning is relative to the speaker’s time and space. Like today, tomorrow; here, there; you, they, these are fleeting, fickle words.
As I see it, shifting perspectives, the relativity of perspectives, is a propelling idea behind this book. That is how this shallow patch of water becomes such a deep source of texts about discovery and surprise, about seeing things anew. The median depth of the Baltic is fifty-five meters, slightly less than half the height of Rostock’s Petrikirche. It is neither deep nor vast, but is what oceanographers call a marginal sea. It gets its vastness from the multitude of experiences it has been subjected to. That is the very point about the title of Tomas Tranströmer’s long poem Östersjöar (Baltics), which features prominently in the book. This poem has long been found in all the languages of the Baltics — and then some — in the digital Baltic Sea Library (www.balticsealibrary.info). The same point is made in Liedtke’s preface to the book, which is headed “Ostseewelten”[Baltic Sea Worlds], a very audible plural.
Tranströmer’s Baltics poem veers between the Stockholm archipelago and Liepāja/Libau, and thus highlights a distance that is crucial to, indeed constitutive of, this sea’s history. The SSR of Latvia was virtually a world apart from Sweden; the Baltic Sea was split down the middle. It was, to a rare extent as far as small seas go, a politically divided entity, much like Berlin or Nikosia/Lefkoşa.
Being a contested area, it has always been an object of curiosity about the other borderers, plunderers, explorers, merchants, townbuilders, and statebuilders — curiosity about the Other, in short. And Die Ostsee is organized along this curiosity, this inquisitiveness. It feeds on it. Its sections come in the following sequence: Arrival and departure, Real and invented voyages, Histories and battles, Close by the water, Cities by the sea, Provinces, Islands and peripheries. This organization in itself guides the reader into looking at the contents in a certain way. National anthologies usually take the easy way out, proceeding historically, serially, ticking off currents and tendencies, whereas supra-national anthologies tend to construct their narration thematically, as in, e.g., Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s thesaurus Museum der modernen Poesie, which subdivides its contents into Moments, Localities, Seas, Graves, Nuptials, Laments, etc.
If your guiding lights are neither national nor supranational, nor even poetic, but spatial, and that is the case here, you’re at liberty to try any amount of narrative reframing. Time — cumulative, linear time — has dominated historical discourse in all its aspects, and in any national framework there is always an implicit priority to boost the national idea. If you skip this focus, you can raise space from being just a setting into being a theme, and you can gain new nodal points for your story in the process.
Arrivals and departures — travel — make up a theme that runs through not just the first sections of the book, but through all of it. When your customary setting changes, you’re thrown off balance. Everything becomes new and strange. This has been an age-old principle not only for travel literature, but also for any writing that wants to ‘make it new’, to deautomatize, to freshen up perspectives, to unsettle. And much of the strangeness cuts both ways. A traveller sees things that are new and strange, but he also gets to know himself better in new surroundings. “It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists we cannot change because it does not”, Alain de Botton remarks in his The Art of Travel. You have to expose yourself to strangeness in order to unsettle yourself.
The book is full of matter for comparison, which is another way of looking anew at things. Carl Michael Bellman, Sweden’s great eighteenth-century songwriter and composer, is portrayed in one way by Ernst Moritz Arndt and in quite another by Johannes Bobrowski. Königsberg looks different to Nikolai Karamsin, Russian traveller of great renown, arriving from the east and much impressed, than it looks to Hans Graf von Lehndorff a century and a half later, in the chaos which ensues after the Russian army’s arrival from the east. And readers who think Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, with eels eating a horse’s carcass, provides a rather drastic image of fishing in the Baltic will find in this book that Werner Bergengruen outshines Grass. The Balto-German Bergengruen’s eels feed on a fisherman’s wife.
Foreigners or aliens can surprise you at home, too: we read about a Finnish lady during one of those many wars with Russia. All of a sudden a Kalmuck enters her room and she is literally dumbfounded. The mere sight of him deprives her of her hearing, forever. Encounters with novelty abound. Aptly, the sections of Die Ostsee are interfoliated with the Swedish cartographer Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina of Scandinavia from 1539. The map delights in the beasts and dragons that cartographers knew inhabit untravelled territories.
The book starts out by pulling a trick of sorts: its first text and first arrival is not so much at some spot in the Baltic but in the Baltic per se, as a sea. In its opening text the Finnish-Swedish writer Arvid Mörne arrives at the coast, and finally in Riga in 1929. Mörne sets out from Lake Wolfgang on a meandering journey, starting on the continent and narrowing in on the deep north. His essay is little known even in Finland, but it is an inventive way of sensitizing the reader to the northern shallows of the Baltic by descending and zooming in on them from mid-European alpine heights. The core interest of the book is the water catchment area of the Baltic basin. The people who inhabit the Baltic rim area (die Anrainer) are about as numerous as the population of Germany.
I have stressed the importance of space partly because time is always the walk-over winner in anything that smells of history, whereas in Die Ostsee it is not. But obviously it too smells of history. At the farthest end of the spectrum we find Tacitus, the man who put Germans and even more faraway peoples on the map. I cannot refrain from telling you something about myself, as a Finn, in the words of Tacitus:
“Die Finnen sind sonderbar wild, grässlich arm: sie haben nicht Waffen, nicht Pferd, nicht Heim; […] Den Menschen gegenüber ohne Fürsorge, sorglos gegenüber Göttern, haben sie sich des Allerschwersten versichert: niemals von einem Wunsche belästigt zu werden.”
[In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fenni, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; […] Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished].
This is history; today even Finns have desires.
This book, then, is born out of the happy confluence of time and space: in a sense it is the child of the reemergence after 1989 of the Baltic as a common area, not a split space. It has been a slow and tentative reemergence; such things take their time. I am reminded of an anecdote told by the Estonian novelist Jaan Kross at a Lahti International Writers’ reunion which I chaired in the very early nineties. On one of his first trips outside the Soviet Union Kross, who is well represented in the present book, was strolling about in a bazaar in Cairo. A carpet seller asked him where he came from. “From Estonia”, he proudly answered. “There’s no such place”, said the carpet man. “Oh yes there is”, Kross insisted, and walked in triumph to a wall map he had observed in the sales stall, in order to point out Estonia’s particular place in the universe. But as he got up close, he realised that this particular place was covered in toto by the Michelin Man, the fat cartyre man logo, which easily took the place of all three Baltic republics. Ocular proof was not to be had, and the carpet seller never suspended his disbelief in the existence of Estonia.
From this we learn that not even Michelin guidance can be trusted. We can get better bearings if we access texts which are imbued by or soaked in the history of space, and map them along the two-thousand-year time span available to us, as in Die Ostsee.
Review of Die Ostsee [Berlin: Galiani 2018]
Published in Baltic Worlds February 2019
When Sophia Smith Galer’s How to Kill a Language was reviewed under the provocative title “Sometimes It’s OK to Let a Language Die,” the discussion produced an unexpected response. Even people with little previous engagement with linguistics or language preservation found themselves defending the right of linguistic communities to maintain and use their languages. What initially appeared to be a debate about language death thus became a broader discussion about cultural identity, community rights, and the value of linguistic diversity.
For many people, language extinction has long been difficult to comprehend, both as a linguistic and as a cultural phenomenon. And when we imagine languages disappearing, we tend to associate them with distant and remote parts of the world rather than with Europe. Yet Europe has its own endangered languages, and some of their stories are surprisingly close to home. One such case is Livonian (līvõ kēļ), an autochthonous Finnic language of Latvia and the southernmost member of the Finnic language group. Its history offers a particularly revealing perspective on what it means for a language to survive, or to be considered alive in the first place.
Livonian occupies a distinctive position within Latvia’s cultural and linguistic landscape. Alongside other elements of Livonian intangible cultural heritage, the language is recognized in the Latvian Constitution, included in the Latvian National Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and represented in Latvia’s Cultural Canon. These forms of institutional recognition reflect the significance attributed to Livonian not only as a means of communication, but also as an element of cultural and historical identity.
The history of the Livonian(s) is closely connected to the geography of the region. Livonian was traditionally spoken in areas situated along major waterways and trade routes, places where different ethnic and linguistic communities came into contact, and at times even conflict. The northeastern coast of Courland (Kurzeme) and the Daugava River, for example, formed part of an eastern route used by Scandinavian groups arriving from the western Baltic Sea region.
Traditionally, the sea was of vital importance to Livonians. The sea was not simply the landscape along which Livonians lived; for the coastal communities, it was also their principal source of livelihood. From at least the eighteenth century, maritime fishing was the main economic activity in the Livonian villages of northern Courland. Fish formed an important part of the local diet, but it was also a commodity that could be salted, dried, smoked, and even traded. The close connection between the people and the sea was reflected even in their own language: Courland Livonians used the word kalāmīed, meaning “fishermen,” as one of their self-designations, while rāndalizt meant “coast-dwellers.” In this sense, fishing was more than an occupation. It was part of the social and cultural identity of the communities that developed along the Livonian Coast. This maritime way of life also helped shape the geography of Livonian settlement. The coastal villages were relatively isolated from the inland areas of Courland, separated in places by forests, marshes, and poor sandy soils. The importance of fishing continued well into the twentieth century, although the conditions under which it was practiced changed dramatically. During the Soviet period, for example, restrictions on coastal fishing contributed to the decline or relocation of several traditional fishing communities.
Today, however, the question of how many Livonian speakers there are is surprisingly tricky to answer.
While the 2011 Latvian national census provides one possible point of reference, with around 250 people identifying themselves as Livonians, ethnic or cultural identification and active language use are not the same thing. There is no direct proportional relationship between the number of people who identify as Livonian and the number of people who actively speak the language.
This distinction can take us to a much more complex question: what does it actually mean for a language to exist? If only a small number of people speak it every day, is the language “dead”? Can a linguistic identity survive when everyday language use has declined? And what happens when a language that has suffered a dramatic decline in intergenerational transmission is documented, taught, learned, and deliberately revitalized?
The story of Livonian offers a particularly revealing way of exploring these questions.
From documenting a language to writing in it
The history of written Livonian stretches back to the nineteenth century. In 1861, the first systematic grammar of Livonian was published by the linguists Anders Johan Sjögren and Ferdinand Johann Wiedemann. A grammar does more than list words: it describes how a language is structured, documents its sounds, word forms, and various rules for constructing sentences. Sjögren and Wiedemann’s work therefore provided one of the earliest detailed records of Livonian as a linguistic system at the time.
Just two years later, in 1863, the Gospel of Matthew became the first book ever published in Livonian. Yet, there is an important clarification to this milestone. The book was not produced primarily for Livonian speakers to read themselves. It served largely as a linguistic resource: a text that could be collected, studied, and used to document the language. The appearance of this book, in other words, did not necessarily mean that Livonian had become a written language for everyday use among its speakers. That changed in 1880, when another edition of the Gospel of Matthew was published, this time specifically for Livonian readers. It was the first Livonian book intended for the Livonian-speaking community itself, which marked an important shift from scholarly efforts to document the language to using it as an actual medium of reading.
The next major step came in 1921 with the publication of Ežmi līvõd lugdõbrōntõz, the first secular Livonian reader, prepared by the linguists Lauri Kettunen and Oskar Loorits. A “reader” is a book designed to help people learn to read, usually through a series of short texts suited to learners. Unlike the earlier Gospel publications, this book was not primarily religious or documentary. It was intended to support literacy in Livonian and provide speakers with lively texts in their own language. Four additional readers followed by 1926.
The development of Livonian educational materials continued during the 1930s. In 1935, Livonian linguist and activist Pētõr Damberg produced another reader intended for use both in schools and in Livonian-speaking homes. The significance of such books went beyond literacy: they helped establish Livonian as a language that could be used in education and in everyday community life.
The 1930s also saw the publication of Līvli, a Livonian-language newspaper that appeared between 1931 and 1939. Newspapers can be particularly important in the development of a written language because they require writers and editors to make consistent decisions about spelling and grammar. In this respect, Līvli contributed to the development and standardization of modern Livonian orthography.
Another reader was written during this period by Kōrli Stalte, another prominent Livonian linguist and activist. Unlike the other publications, however, it remained unpublished for decades. It finally appeared in print only in 2011.
These publications show the gradual transformation of Livonian from a language being documented by scholars into a language that its speakers could read, write, teach, and encounter in their own community. Written language, however, needs readers and writers; and a real quality education requires more than books.
The question of survival therefore leads naturally to another question: how has Livonian been passed on from one generation to the next?
From the classroom to the community
The first organized Livonian-language instruction began in the 1920s, when Livonian was introduced as an elective subject in five village schools in Livonian-speaking areas. Despite the small size of the Livonian population, around 100 children attended these classes each year. The experiment, however, faced considerable difficulties. Students in the same classroom often had very different levels of proficiency, while teachers had limited access to suitable teaching methods and the materials were still rather scarce. Children also had few opportunities to use Livonian outside school. Even if a pupil learned new words and grammatical structures in class, there was often nowhere to use them afterwards.
Then came a much more dramatic interruption. Following the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, formal Livonian-language instruction was interrupted. At the same time, broader political and social changes contributed to the displacement of Livonians from their historical homeland, which further led to a sharp decline in the number of speakers. With institutional education no longer available, efforts to maintain Livonian increasingly shifted away from schools and toward the community itself. When Latvia regained independence, Livonian classes resumed in Riga. By then, Livonian was increasingly being taught as a heritage language, a language connected to a person’s family or cultural background, even when it is no longer their first or everyday language. There had already been efforts to teach Livonian outside the formal school system, including work by the professional teacher Pētõr Damberg in the 1970s.
Yet even then many of the old problems remained. Learners were geographically dispersed, their levels of proficiency still varied considerably, the number of qualified teachers was low, and teaching materials and established pedagogical approaches were still limited. As a result, some language courses gradually became as much community gatherings as conventional classes. These gatherings played an important role in strengthening cultural identity and social connections, even if their direct impact on the actual language acquisition was limited. For a language with a very small speaker population, such as Livonian, teaching cannot be separated from the question of community. A language needs not only teachers and textbooks, but also people with whom it can be spoken, places where it can be heard, and situations in which using it feels natural. Then, things gradually start to change.
Keeping Livonian alive
One of the most important initiatives for younger Livonian learners has been the annual Mierlinkizt summer camp, established in 1992. The camp brought together children and teenagers from Livonian families and gave them a unique chance to learn the language, engage with Livonian culture, and develop relationships with other young people who share a connection to the community.
But even a successful summer camp leaves a problem: what happens when summer ends?
In 2023, Valts Ernštreits and Gunta Kļava, leading researchers of the Livonian Institute under the University of Latvia, drew attention to precisely this problem. After the summer camp ended, children had few opportunities to continue practicing Livonian before the following year. The challenge, therefore, was not simply to teach the language, but to create regular opportunities to use it.
This observation helped motivate a new generation of more sustained language-learning activities and community events. Since then, regular Livonian language courses have been organized by the University of Latvia’s Livonian Institute and funded by the Latvian Ministry of Education and Science. Courses have been offered since the 2024/2025 academic year, following the year structure of Latvia’s formal education system.
The programme has grown rapidly. In its first year, Livonian was taught in a single group of 12 participants. By the second year, the programme had expanded to five groups, with approximately 35 regular participants. Including those who attended only one semester or participated intermittently, the total number of participants reached around 45. The groups themselves illustrate the diversity of the contemporary Livonian learning community. In 2025/2026, one group was specifically intended for children and included five participants, one of whom was not Livonian and joined in the second semester. Two teenage groups were also formed. One had five regular participants, with another two or three attending occasionally; all of the regular participants identified a Livonian family background. The second combined teenagers and adults and had three regular participants, with another two or three attending occasionally. Most had a Livonian background, with one exception. A further mixed group brought together 13 regular participants and three occasional attendees. All but one were Livonian, while the group also included two researchers of the institute.1
These numbers may appear small compared with conventional language programmes. For Livonian, however, they represent a meaningful expansion of opportunities to learn and use the language. At the same time, the small number of potential learners and the practical constraints of the Latvian education system make it unlikely that Livonian will become a regular subject in mainstream schools. Instead, the Livonian Institute has developed a more flexible model, allowing learners of different ages, backgrounds, proficiency levels, and geographical locations to participate.
This flexibility reflects a broader reality of language revitalization. A highly endangered language cannot survive simply because it appears on a timetable. It needs an ecosystem of use. That ecosystem is increasingly being built both online and in person.
Learners and speakers now have access to digital resources such as the Livonian-Latvian-Estonian-English Dictionary Livonian.tech, as well as online spaces for language practice. Face-to-face courses provide opportunities for learners with different levels of proficiency to study together. Other initiatives focus specifically on using Livonian rather than simply learning about it. On social media for example, the community Pōlaks līvõkīelkõks on Instagram and Facebook provides another space where communication takes place exclusively in Livonian.
Such initiatives may look small from the outside: a social-media page, a summer camp, a handful of language classes. Taken together, however, they address one of the central problems facing an endangered language: the lack of places in which the language can actually be used. It is also important to distinguish between community participation and the infrastructure that makes such participation possible. Many of these initiatives have been established and continue to be actively coordinated by the Livonian Institute, which plays a central role in creating the physical and digital spaces where Livonian can be encountered and used. The Livonian Institute was established in 2018 and has played a crucial role in the language ecosystem ever since.
So, is Livonian alive?
The history of Livonian is, in many ways, a history of interruptions. Its traditional communities were transformed; its number of speakers declined; formal teaching disappeared and later returned; books were produced, then left unpublished; and generations grew up with increasingly limited opportunities to use the language. Yet there is another way to read this history.
Livonian has been documented, written down, taught, printed, read, researched, learned, spoken, and, perhaps most importantly, deliberately created spaces in which it can be used again. Its speakers and learners are not simply preserving an artifact from the past. They are negotiating what place the language can have in the present. This makes the question “How many speakers does Livonian have?” less important than it first appeared. Counting speakers is important. So are documentation, education, and intergenerational transmission. But none of these measures alone can fully capture what is happening to the language. A language can exist in the memories of families, in books and dictionaries, in classrooms and summer camps, in social-media conversations and reading circles. It can exist as a marker of identity even when it is not someone's everyday language. And it can acquire new speakers who have no childhood memory of hearing it at home.
Perhaps the more useful question is what people are doing to keep Livonian alive. The answer, in the case of Livonian, is remarkably concrete: they are writing books, teaching children, organizing summer camps, building dictionaries, holding reading circles, creating digital spaces, learning the language as adults, and finding new ways to speak it to one another.
1 Based on statistical data provided by the Livonian Institute.
Þæt Estland is swȳðe mycel, and þǣr bið swȳðe manig burh, and on ǣlcere byrig bið cyning. And þǣr bið swȳðe mycel hunig, and fiscnað, and sē cyning and þā rīcostan men drincað mȳran meolc, and þā unspēdigan and þā þēowan drincad medo. Þǣr bið swȳðe mycel gewinn betwēonan him. And ne bid ðǣr nǣnig ealo gebrowen mid Estum, ac þǣr bið medo genōh. And þǣr is mid Estum ðēaw, þonne þǣr bið man dēad, þæt hē līð inne unforbærned mid his māgum and frēondum mōnað, ge hwīlum twēgen; and þā kyningas, and þā ōðre hēahðungene men, swā micle lencg swā hī māran spēda habbað, hwīlum healf gēar þæt hī bēoð unforbærned, and licgað bufan eorðan on hyra hūsum. And ealle þā hwīle þe þæt līc bið inne, þǣr sceal bēon gedrync and plega, oð ðone dæg þe hī hine forbærnað. Þonne þȳ ylcan dæge [þe] hī hine tō þǣm āde beran wyllað, þonne tōdǣlað hī his feoh, þæt þǣr tō lǣfe bið æfter þǣm gedrynce and þǣm plegan on fīf oððe syx, hwȳlum on mā, swā swā þæs fēos andēfn bið. Alecgað hit ðonne forhweæga on ānre mīle þone mǣstan dǣl fram þǣm tūne, þonne ōðerne, ðonne þone þriddan, oþ þe hyt eall ālēd bið on þǣre ānre mīle; and sceall bēon sē lǣsta dǣl nȳhst þǣm tūne ðe sē dēada man on līð. Ðonne sceolon bēon gesamnode ealle ðā menn ðe swyftiste hors habbað on þǣm lande, forhwæga on fīf mīlum oððe on syx mīlum fram þǣm fēo. Þonne ærnað hȳ ealle tōweard þǣm fēo: ðonne cymeð sē man sē þæt swiftoste hors hafað tō þǣm ǣrestan dǣle and tō þǣm mǣstan, and swā ǣlc æfter ōðrum, oþ hit bið eall genumen; and sē nimð þone lǣstan dǣl sē nȳhst þǣm tūne þæt feoh geærneð. And þonne rīdeð ǣlc hys weges mid ðǣm fēo, and hyt mōtan habban eall; and for ðȳ þǣr bēoð þā swiftan hors ungefōge dȳre. And þonne his gestrēon bēoð þus ealle āspended, þonne byrð man hit ūt, and forbærneð mid his wǣpnum and hrægle; and swīðost ealle hys spēda hȳ forspendað mid þǣmlangan leger þæs dēadan mannes inne, and þæs þe hȳ be þǣm wegum ālecgað, þe ðā fremdan tō ærnað, and nimað. And þæt is mid Estum þǣw þæt þǣr sceal ǣlces geðēodes man bēon forbærned; and gyf þār man ān bān findeð unforbærned, hī hit sceolan miclum gebētan. And þǣr is mid Estum ān mǣgð þæt hī magon cyle gewyrcan; and þȳ þǣr licgað þā dēadan men swā lange, and ne fūliað, þæt hȳ wyrcað þone cyle him on. And þēah man āsette twēgen fǣtels full ealað oððe wæteres, hȳ gedōð þæt ǣgþer bið oferfroren, sam hit sȳ sumor sam winter.
Fela spella him sǣdon þā Beormas ǣgþer ge of hiera āgnum lande ge of þǣm landum þe ymb hīe ūtan wǣron; ac hē nyste hwæt þæs sōþes wæs, for þǣm hē hit self ne geseah. Þā Finnas, him þūhte, ond þā Beormas sprǣcon nēah ān geþēode. Swīþost hē fōr ðīder, tō ēacan þæs landes scēawunge, for þǣm horshwælum, for ðǣm hīe habbað swīþe æþele bān on hiora tōþum — þā tēð hīe brōhton sume þǣm cyninge — ond hiora hȳd bið swīðe gōd tō sciprāpum. Sē hwæl bið micle lǣssa þonne ōðre hwalas: ne bið hē lengra ðonne syfan elna lang; ac on his āgnum lande is sē betsta hwælhuntað; þā bēoð eahta and fēowertiges elna lange, and þā mǣstan fīftiges elna lange; þāra hē sǣde þæt hē syxa sum ofslōge syxtig on twām dagum.
Hē wæs swȳðe spēdig man on þǣm ǣhtum þe heora spēda on bēoð, þæt is, on wildrum. Hē hæfde þā gȳt, ðā hē þone cyningc sōhte, tamra dēora unbebohtra syx hund. Þā dēor hī hātað 'hrānas'; þāra wǣron syx stælhrānas; ðā bēoð swȳðe dyre mid Finnum, for ðǣm hȳ fōð þā wildan hrānas mid. Hē wæs mid þǣm fyrstum mannum on þǣm lande: næfde hē þēah mā ðonne twēntig hrȳðera, and twentig scēapa, and twentig swȳna; and þæt lȳtle þæt hē erede, hē erede mid horsan. Ac hyra ār is mǣst on þǣm gafole þe ðā Finnas him gyldað. Þæt gafol bið on dēora fellum, and on fugela feðerum, and hwales bāne, and on þǣm sciprāpum, þe bēoð of hwæles hȳde geworht, and of sēoles. Ǣghwilc gylt be hys gebyrdum. Sē byrdesta sceall gyldan fīftȳne mearðes fell, and fīf hrānes, and ān beran fel, and tȳn ambra feðra, and berenne kyrtel oððe yterenne, and twegen sciprāpas; ǣgþer sȳ syxtig elna lang, ōþer sȳ of hwæles hȳde geworht, ōþer of sīoles.
Hē sǣde ðæt Norðmanna land wǣre swȳþe lang and swȳðe smæl. Eal þæt his man āþer oððe ettan oððe erian mæg, þæt līð wið ðā sǣ;and þæt is þēah on sumum stōwum swȳðe clūdig; and licgað wilde mōras wið ēastan and wið uppon emnlange þǣm bȳnum lande. On þǣm mōrum eardiað Finnas. And þæt bȳne land is ēasteweard brādost, and symle swā norðor swā smælre. Ēastewerd hit mæg bīon syxtig mīla brād, oþþe hwēne brādre; and middeweard þrītig oððe brādre; and norðeweard hē cwæð, þǣr hit smalost wǣre, þæt hit mihte bēon þrēora mīla brād tō þǣm mōre; and se mōr syðþan, on sumum stōwum, swā brād swā man mæg on twām wucum oferfēran; and on sumum stōwum swā brād swā man mæg on syx dagum oferfēran.
Ðonne is tōemnes þǣm lande sūðeweardum, on ōðre healfe þæs mōres, Swēoland, oþ þæt land norðeweard; and tōemnes þǣm lande norðeweardum, Cwēna land. Þā Cwēnas hergiað hwīlum on ðā Norðmen ofer ðone mōr, hwīlum þā Norðmen on hȳ. And þǣr sint swīðe micle meras fersce geond þā mōras; and berað þā Cwēnas hyra scypu ofer land on ðā meras, and þanon hergiað on þā Norðmen; hȳ habbað swȳðe lȳtle scypa and swȳðe lēohte.
Ōhthere sǣde þæt sīo scīr hātte Hālgoland þe hē on būde. Hē cwæð þæt nān man ne būde be norðan him. Þonne is ān port on sūðeweardum þǣm lande, þone man hǣt Scīringes hēal. Þyder hē cwæð þæt man ne mihte geseglian on ānum mōnðe, gyf man on niht wīcode, and ǣlce dæge hæfde ambyrne wind; and ealle ðā hwīle hē sceal seglian be lande. And on þæt stēorbord him bið ǣrest Īraland, and þonne ðā īgland þe synd betux Īralande and þissum lande. Þonne is þis land oð hē cymð tō Scīrincges hēale, and ealne weg on þæt bæcbord Norðweg. Wið sūðan þone Scīringes hēal fylð swȳðe mycel sǣ ūp in on ðæt lond; sēo is brādre þonne ǣnig man ofer sēon mæge. And is Gotland on ōðre healfe ongēan, and siððan Sillende. Sēo sǣ līð mænig hund mīla ūp in on þæt land.
And of Sciringeshēale hē cwæð þæt hē seglode on fīf dagan tō þǣm porte þe mon hǣt æt Hǣþum; sē stent betuh Winedum, and Seaxum, and Angle, and hȳrð in on Dene. Ðā hē þiderweard seglode fram Sciringeshēale, þā wæs him on þæt bæcbord Denamearc and on þæt stēorbord wīdsǣ þrȳ dagas; and þā, tweg_en dagas ǣr hē tō Hǣþum cōme, him wæs on þæt stēorbord Gotland, and Sillende, and īglanda fela. On þǣm landum eardodon Engle, ǣr hī hider on land cōman. And hym wæs ðā twēgen dagas on ðæt bæcbord þā īgland þe in [on] Denemearce hȳrað.