"he was a very rich man in all classes of property of which their wealth [i.e., the wealth of those peoples] consists, that is, in wild beasts ('wildrum'). He had further, when he came to the king, six hundred tame, unsold animals. These animals they called reindeer. There were six decoy reindeer ('stæl hranas'), which are very dear among the Finns, for with them they catch the wild reindeer. He was among the principal men in that country [Hålogaland], although he had no more than twenty horned cattle, and twenty sheep, and twenty pigs; and the little ploughing he did was done with horses [i.e., not with oxen, as among the Anglo-Saxons]. But their largest revenue is the tribute paid them by the Finns; this tribute consists of pelts and birds' feathers [down] and whalebone [walrus tusks], and they gave ships' ropes made of whales' [walrus] hide, and of seals'. Each one pays according to his rank; the chiefs have to pay fifteen martens' skins, five reindeers' skins, one bear's skin, ten ankers of feathers, a kirtle of bear- or otter-skin, and two ships' ropes, each sixty cubits long, one made of whales' [i.e., walrus] hide, and the other of seals'."
This description gives a valuable picture of the state of society in northernmost Norway at that time. Ottar's Finns had tame and half-tamed reindeer, and their hunting even of such sea-beasts as walrus and seal was sufficiently productive to enable them to pay a considerable tribute. These early inhabitants of the most northerly regions of the old world will be treated of later in a separate chapter.
Ottar's mention of walrus-hunting is of great interest, as showing that it was regularly carried on both by Norwegians and Finns even at that time. Of about the same period (about the year 900) is the well-known Anglo-Saxon casket, called the Franks Casket, of which the greater part is now in the British Museum, one side being in Florence. The casket, which on account of its rich decoration is of great historical value, is made of walrus ivory. It has been thought that it might be made of the tusks that Ottar brought to King Alfred. If this was so, it is in any case improbable that so costly a treasure should be worked in a material the value and suitability of which were unknown. We must therefore suppose that walrus ivory sometimes found its way at that time to this part of Europe, and it could come from no other people but the Norwegians. They certainly carried on walrus-hunting long before Ottar's time. This appears also from his narrative, for men who were not well practised could not kill sixty of these large animals in a couple of days, even if we are to suppose that they were killed with lances on land where they lie in big herds. If these sixty animals were really whales (i.e., small whales), and not walruses, it is still more certain evidence of long practice. We see, too, that walrus ivory and ships' ropes of walrus hide had become such valuable objects of commerce as to be demanded in tribute. So difficult and dangerous an occupation as this hunting, which requires an equipment of special appliances, does not arise among any people in a short time, especially at so remote a period of history, when all independent development of a new civilisation, which could not come from outside, proceeded very slowly. It is therefore an interesting question whether the Norwegians developed this walrus-hunting themselves or learned it from an earlier seafaring people of hunters, who in these northern regions must consequently have been Ottar's Finns. To find an answer to this, it will be necessary to review the whole difficult question of the Finns and Lapps connectedly, which will be done in a later section.