The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

by Michael Pye

There was a time when nobody could imagine going further: the northern sea was the very edge of the world. In 16 CE the Roman Drusus Germanicus tried to take his fleet north and was beaten back by storms; the poet Albinovanus Pedo was with him and wrote that the gods were calling them back to stop them seeing the very end of everything. Pedo wondered why their ships were violating these foreign seas and stirring up the quiet homes of the gods. For the northern sea was not just, as the Arab geographer Al Idrisi wrote, ‘the sea of perpetual gloom’,14 it was the place where the oceans clashed, where the tides were made as the waters rushed in and out of bottomless caves and the waters fell away into ‘primordial and first matter, that was in the beginning of the world … called the “abyss”’.