though not so much so as to justify Professor Ingram's remark, "that his
notes were chiefly extracted thence." (Pref. viii.) Professor Murray of
Göttingen (1765), and Langebeck, in his _Scriptores Rerum Danicarum_
(1773), make no mention of these arctic discoveries; and the latter is
satisfied that the Cwenas are the Amazons of Adam of Bremen:--

"De Quenorum priscis Sedibus et Quenlandiæ situ, vide Torfæus,
_Hist. Norweg._ i. 140. Adamus Bremens, pp. 58, 59. 61., per
Amazones et terram Foeminarum voluit Queuones et Quenladiam
intelligi."

and it remains, therefore, to the next commentator, John Reinhold
Forster (the companion navigator with Sir Joseph Banks), to have been
the first to whom we owe the important error. He was praised by Daines
Barrington, for whose edition he gave the notes afterwards reproduced in
his _Northern Voyages of Discovery_; but still with certain
reservations. The honourable translator found some negative evidences
which seemed to militate against the idea that the voyage could have
extended into the arctic circle; for, in such a case, Othere would
hardly have refrained from mentioning the perpetual day of those
regions; the northern lights, which he must have experienced; to which
{178} we add, the perpetual snows, and many other very striking
peculiarities, so new and seemingly inexplicable to a southern traveller
or listener.

Succeeding writers seem to have had fewer scruples, and to have admitted
the idea without consideration. Thorkelin, the Dane, (when in England to
copy out the poem of _Beowulf_ for publication at Copenhagen), gave a
very flattering testimony to Forster's notes, in _Bibliotheca
Topographica_, vol. ix. p. 891. _et seq._, though I believe he