Iceland lay, according to the Bruges itinerary, midway between Norway and Greenland, precisely as on the Nancy map. Between Norway and Iceland, according to the same itinerary, lay "Fareö" [Færö], and the fabulous island "Femöe," "where only women are born and never men."
After speaking of the "third headland" in 71° on the east coast of Greenland, the Nancy text goes on:
"But from this headland an immense country extends eastward as far as Russia. And in its [i.e., the country's] northern parts dwell the infidel Karelians ('Careli infideles'), whose territory ('regio') extends to the north pole ('sub polo septentrionalis') towards the Seres[260] of the east, wherefore the pole ['polus' == the arctic circle ?], which to us is in the north, is to them in the south in 66°."
It is probable, as suggested by Björnbo and Petersen, that these "Careli infideles" are identical with those who are found almost in the same place, in the ocean to the north of Norway, on one of the maps in Marino Sanudo's work (in the Paris MS., see above, p. 225), and who on other maps belonging to that work are placed on the mainland to the north-east of Scandinavia. As pointed out by Storm, "Kareli" are also mentioned together with Greenland and "Mare Gronlandicum" in the Bruges itinerary.
Björnbo and Petersen maintain that Claudius Clavus has here consciously put forward a new and revolutionary view which was a complete break with the cosmogony of the whole of the Middle Ages, since according to the latter the disc of the earth was entirely surrounded by sea to the south of the North Pole, as represented on the wheel-maps. I think this is attributing to Clavus rather too much original thought, of which his maps and text do not otherwise give evidence. It is, of course, correct that the idea of land, and inhabited land, too, at the North Pole, or to the north of the Arctic Circle, did not agree with the general learned conception of the Middle Ages; but the same idea had already been clearly enough expressed in Norwegian-Icelandic literature. Even the Historia Norwegiæ has inhabited land beyond the sea in the north, and the Icelandic legendary sagas and Saxo have it too. In addition to these, the tract included in the "Rymbegla" says distinctly (see above, p. 239) that this land in the opinion of some lies under the pole-star (cf. Clavus's expression: "sub polo septentrionalis"). The fact that the continent on the Medicean map of the world extended boundlessly on the north into the unknown (whereas Africa ended in a peninsula on the south) must have confirmed Clavus in the view that the land reached to the pole. To this was added, what perhaps weighed most with him, the fact that such a view did not conflict with Ptolemy, whose continent also had no limit on the north.