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| The Flammarion engraving, 1888, artist unknown |
“Medieval people thought the world was flat.” Well no, they didn’t, not educated people at least
(and after all there’s still the Flat Earth Society today, whose members appear
to believe that the moonshots were a hoax, though it’s hard to tell how many of
them are simply having a bit of straight-faced fun.) And there were plenty of educated medieval
people.
Mind you, the pre-Christian early medieval Norse did –
theoretically – believe in a sort-of flat earth. They imagined middle earth surrounded by an
encircling ocean, with Yggdrasil, the World Tree, growing up from its centre. Even then, the delving roots
and high branches of Yggdrasil evoke layer upon layer of other dimensions. But this poetic, mythic explanation of the
universe was unlikely to have been applied in any serious way to the voyages
the Vikings made, which were guided by careful observation of landmarks and ocean
currents, of drifting seaweed and circling gulls, of the migration of whales
and the position of stationary clouds over land.
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| The Ash Yggdrasi by Friedrich Wilhem Heine |
I suspect pragmatic Norse sailors performed that
simple human trick of being able to believe two incompatible things at once:
religio-mythic descriptions of the universe were one thing: the sea route to Greenland was quite another. In my book ‘West of the Moon’, the storm-driven Norse sailors of the knarr ‘Watersnake’, sailing across
the North Atlantic, argue about their
position.
“What if
we miss Vinland altogether and sail over the edge of the world?” Floki piped
up, conjuring in every mind a vision of the endless waterfall plunging over the
rim of the earth.
“Showing your ignorance, Floki,” said Magnus. “The world is shaped
like a dish, and that keeps the water in. Ye can’t sail over the edge.”
“That’s not right,” Arne argued. “The world’s like a dish, but it’s
an upside down dish. You can see that by the way it curves.”
Magnus burst out laughing. “Then why wouldn’t the sea just run
off? You can’t pour water into an upside-down dish.”
“It’s like a dish with a rim,” said Gunnar in a tone that brooked no
arguments. “There’s land all round the ocean, just like there’s land all
round any lake. Stands to reason. And that means so long as we keep
sailing west, we’ll strike the coastline.”
West of the Moon, HarperCollins 2009
Gunnar is wrong, of course, but in a practical sense he’s
also right. Sail far enough west from
anywhere in Europe, and you’ll strike the
American continent somewhere. And Arne’s right too in his observation of the curvature of
the world’s surface - obvious to any sailor who sees the land rising out of the
sea as he sails towards it. In Canto II
of Dante’s early 14th century ‘Purgatorio’, the boat bringing the
souls of the saved to the island
of Purgatory rises above
the horizon as it approaches: Dante spies the tips of its guiding angel’s wings
before the boat itself is visible:
...as
Mars reddens through the heavy vapours, low in the west over the waves at the
coming of dawn, so a light appeared… coming over the sea so quickly that no
flight equals its movement, and when I had taken my eyes from it for a moment
to question my guide, I saw it once more, grown bigger and brighter. Then
something white appeared on each side of it, and little by little, another
whiteness emerged from underneath it.
My Master
did not speak a word, until the first whitenesses were seen to be wings… and it
came towards the shore, in a vessel so quick and light that it skimmed the
waves.
(trans. A.S. Kline © 2000)
The Greeks of the 4th century had discovered that
the world is a sphere, a fact which was commonsense observation and no news to
most medieval people, including churchmen.
However, commonsense observation can also deceive. With their own eyes, medieval people could
see the sun, moon and stars turning around the earth. But as C. S. Lewis points out in his indispensable book on the medieval cosmos, ‘The Discarded Image’, this geocentric view of the universe didn’t necessarily
mean they thought the central Earth was the most important thing in it. To get a genuinely Euro-medieval view, you
have to turn your ideas about the cosmos inside out. The eternal, unchangeable, holy realms were
all out there, beyond the circuit of the
changing Moon. The sun and moon and
stars and planets all turned around the earth, set in crystal spheres, making
heavenly harmony as they went. This is
why Lorenzo exclaims to Jessica in ‘The Merchant of Venice’,
Look how
the floor of heaven
Is thick
inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s
not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angels sings....
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| From The Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493 |
My 12th century Welsh heroine Nest, in ‘Dark Angels’, expresses it with the aid of a mural painted by her dead mother:
“See this
picture, how beautiful it is? A map of the whole of Creation! Mam painted
it herself. I used to sit on a stool eating nuts and watching her.”
She pointed. “Look, here’s the Earth in the middle, like a little
ball. All around it is the air. Above that, the Moon.” She
traced a line up the wall. “Next, Mercury and Venus.” Her finger
landed on a fiery little sun with a human face, crackling with life.
“Here’s the Sun. Then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, spinning around and around
the Earth, all of them set in crystal spheres, each one bigger than the last!
Then, this dark blue circle with the stars painted in it – that’s the Fixed
Stars, all turning around together. And then the sphere that makes them all
move, and beyond that” – her finger burst through the last ring, like a chicken
pecking through an eggshell – “Heaven.”
She drew a deep breath. “That’s where my mam is! Outside the
universe. Safe with God.”
Dark Angels, HarperCollins 2007
There’s a grandness of imagination to the medieval design of
the universe, which for centuries worked well as a mathematical model – it
takes into account huge distances, but on a human scale. Humans are small, living on a world that is
tiny compared to the vastness of the Primum Mobile, the sphere of the First
Mover - but not scarily insignificant.
Chaucer’s Troilus, in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (written mid
1380’s), ascends to the seventh sphere after his death and looks down:
…And down
from thennes fast he gan avise
The litel
spot of erthe, that with the sea
Embraced
is...
Hell was of course located underground, at the centre of the earth – where Dante and his guide Virgil find gigantic Satan buried up to the waist at the very bottom of the funnel that is Hell – and have to turn around as they climb down his hairy body, to find themselves ascending as they pass the midpoint of the world. Dante narrates:
[Virgil]
took fast hold upon the shaggy flanks
and then
descended, down from tuft to tuft
between
the tangled hair and icy crusts.
When we
had reached the point at which the thigh
Revolves,
just at the swelling of the hip,
My guide,
with heavy strain and rugged work
Reversed
his head to where his legs had been
And
grappled on the hair, as one who climbs.
I thought
that we were going back to Hell.
But Virgil explains:
...When I
turned, that's when you passed the point
to which,
from every part, all weight bears down.
(trans: Allen Mandelbaum)
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| Satan, by Gustave Doré |
I’m struck dumb with admiration at Dante’s utterly fantastic
feat of imagination here. He died in 1321, and it would be over 350 years
before Isaac Newton worked out his theory of gravitation: people observe things, and can deploy them for practical purposes, long
before they can adequately explain them.
Of course, the medieval universe also included another
underground world besides Hell. Tinged
with a whiff of the same infernal smoke - with a suspicion that the back door
might lead much deeper down - in shallow caves and holes and hollow hills was the kingdom of Elfland…
But that is another story.
