Dicuil quotes classical writers who knew about an island which in summer ‘shines both by day and by night under the rays of the sun’ and in winter has no day at all. He also writes that ‘clerics, who had lived on the island from the first of February to the first of August, told me that [around the days of the summer solstice] the setting sun hides itself as though behind a small hill in such a way that there was no darkness in that very small space of time’. He says a man had enough light to pick the lice out of his shirt at night.
