Editing Ginnungagap (section)

==Geographic rationalization==

Scandinavian cartographers from the early 15th century attempted to localize or identify Ginnungagap as a real geographic location from which the creation myth derived. A fragment from a 15th-century (pre-Columbus) Old Norse encyclopedic text entitled ''Gripla'' (Little Compendium) places Ginnungagap between [[Greenland]] and [[Vinland]]:

{{quote|Now is to be told what lies opposite Greenland, out from the bay, which was before named: Furdustrandir hight a land; there are so strong frosts that it is not habitable, so far as one knows; south from thence is Helluland, which is called Skrellingsland; from thence it is not far to Vinland the Good, which some think goes out from Africa; between Vinland and Greenland is Ginnungagap, which flows from the sea called Mare oceanum, and surrounds the whole earth.<ref>''Gripla'', Codex No. 115 translated in ''The Norse Discovery of America'', A. M. Reeves, N. L. Beamish and R. B. Anderson, 1906, p. 238.</ref>}}

A [[scholion]] in a 15th-century manuscript of [[Adam of Bremen]]'s ''[[Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum]]'' similarly refers to ''Ghimmendegop'' as the Norse word for the abyss in the far north.<ref>Dronke, p. 112.</ref>

Later, the 17th-century Icelandic bishop Guðbrandur Thorlaksson also used the name ''Ginnung'''e'''gap'' to refer to a narrow body of water, possibly the [[Davis Strait]], separating the southern tip of Greenland from ''Estotelandia, pars America extrema'', probably [[Baffin Island]].<ref>Seaver, Kirsten "Maps, Myths and Men", Stanford University Press (2004) pp.&nbsp;247-253.</ref>