The Far North
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Agora nestas partes se nomeia A Lápia fria, a inculta Noruega Escandinávia Ilha, que se arreia Das vitórias que Itália não lhe nega. Aqui, enquanto as águas não refreia O congelado inverno, se navega Um braço do Sarmático Oceano Pelo Brúsio, Suécio e frio Dano.
Now in these parts are named cold Lapland, the wild Norway, and the Scandinavian isle, which decks itself with the victories that Italy cannot deny it. Here, while the frozen winter does not rein in the waters, an arm of the Sarmatian Ocean is navigated — along the Prussian, the Swedish, and the cold Danish shores.
In Canto 3, Vasco da Gama, guest of the King of Melinde, gives a geographic survey of Europe. This stanza reaches the far north — Lapland, Norway, Scandinavia, and the Baltic realms of Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark.
Gama is naming the map of Europe for his African host, and the poem climbs to its cold northern edge: Lapland, Norway, Scandinavia, then the Baltic ringed by Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark. It reads as a plain geography lesson, a roll-call of far places most of Camões' readers would never see. The winter that "reins in the waters" is the ice that locks the northern sea for half the year; the "arm of the Sarmatian Ocean" is the Baltic, given its old Ptolemaic name after Sarmatia.
The one buried line is the boast that Scandinavia "adorns itself with the victories that Italy cannot deny it." That is not vague flattery: it points to the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards whom Renaissance readers, following Jordanes, believed poured out of Scandinavia to overrun the Roman Empire. So even this frozen margin of the world carries a claim on Rome, and Camões folds the fall of the old empire into a single relative clause a first reader glides past.
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