Cloves in Medieval Iceland

This piece has also been posted on my Patreon — patreon.com/Before1500. I’ve posted it here on the Medieval Indonesia blog because there are already so many clove-related stories on this site and it feels a little incomplete without this one (and the previous post on Cloves in Bald’s Leechbook). Do subscribe to the Patreon (for as little as $1/month) if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

This post was only possible thanks to the generosity of Dr. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (Twitter: @sagaknitter), who shared several pages of Henning Larsen’s edition of the Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany with me.

In the late fifteenth century, Iceland was at the northwestern edge of the medieval Afro-Eurasian world. Norse settlement in Greenland had come to an end, and the voyages to Vinland were a mere memory, preserved solely in sagas and sailors’ lore. Iceland had been Christian for centuries by this point and since 1262 had been ruled, nominally at least, by the King of Norway; there were no Christian dominions or readers of Latin any further north or west, nor readers of Arabic or Chinese for that matter. Iceland was as far as the medieval world went in that direction.

But Iceland itself was part of that medieval world, and as such Icelanders were influenced by many of the phenomena that tied it together. This included the spice trade. In this post I would like to look at an Icelandic manuscript, now in Ireland, that demonstrates (limited?) knowledge of Asian spices on the island.

An Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany

The manuscript in question is Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23 D 43. It was written in the late fifteenth century, probably in or around 1480. The text is in Old Icelandic and Latin, and it includes several works bundled together as one. When Henning Larsen edited and translated the manuscript into English in 1931, he referred to it as an ‘Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany’, which accurately summarises most but not all of the contents (see also Larsen 1926 for an overview). Much of the content is medical in one way or another, but there’s also a cookery book in there — an Icelandic version of a cookbook we looked at on this blog a couple of years ago — and an excerpt from a lapidary. Neither of these can be said to be wholly ‘medical’. Overall, though, the emphasis is on herbs and remedies — and some of the recipes, written in the language of an island on the very northwestern edge of the medieval Afro-Eurasian ecumene, call for Indonesian spices.

Here I’m going to focus on cloves because space does not permit discussion of every spice in the text and because cloves are fascinating. As you may already know, all the cloves in medieval Afro-Eurasia were harvested from trees (of the species Syzygium aromaticum) that only grew on islands in the extreme east of what is now Indonesia, about as far across the world from Iceland as one could reliably travel before the sixteenth century. The appearance of cloves in a medieval Icelandic text is thus inherently noteworthy: it is one geographical extreme of the hemispheric Middle Ages in demonstrable connection with another.

Clove (‘Gariofilium’) in the Leechbook

The first appearance of cloves that I want to look at here occurs in a recipe for a medicine intended to improve one’s voice. This is to be found in the Leechbook section of the manuscript (Figure 1). The Old Icelandic text and translation below are adapted from Larsen’s (1931:114, 199); italics in the transcription below indicate abbreviations, and I’ve used the Tironian ⁊ for the manuscript’s ‘and’ sign (which Larsen transcribed with ‘ok’, the Old Icelandic word for ‘and’). See the end of this piece for the notes on the transcription and translation.

Fig. 1 — A reference to ‘cloves’ (“gariofilium”) in the Old Icelandic Leechbook (Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23 D 43, f.xiiv [secondary series]).

Item tak olectuarum reuponttícum pípar
gariofilium apium celidínam. cínnamomum an-
ettum. febrifuagam. ⁊ serpillum. blanda alltt. saman
vid fornt vín. ⁊ vell þat vel. ⁊ dreck af þvi f-
astandi hvern dag þat bætir ʀaust.

Item: take electuarium rhaponticum (1), pepper, cloves, apium, celandine, cinnamon, dill (2), feverfew, and wild thyme (3). Mix all with old wine and boil it well and drink of it fasting each day. That improves the voice.

Now, the word for ‘cloves’ here is basically untranslated (and poorly copied) Latin: gariofilium, from normal medieval Latin gariofilum. That might suggest that there was no Icelandic word for ‘clove’, and that Icelanders simply didn’t know what cloves were in the fifteenth century.

Clove (‘Geroforsnaglá’) in the Cookbook

This is complicated, however, by references to cloves under different names elsewhere in the same manuscript. One of these references appears in the Old Icelandic translation of the Libellus de Arte Coquinaria (‘the little book of the art of the kitchen’), a Northern European cookbook that we first looked at on this blog back in 2019. The version of the Libellus that I examined in that post is the Middle Danish text written by Henrik Harpestræng (so-called ‘Codex K’), which is the oldest extant version, having been written in the late thirteenth century. Harpestræng’s version is, however, likely to have been a translation of a Low German original which has not survived. (The text of the Libellus has been edited and translated — see Grewe and Hieatt 2001.)

The Middle Danish text appears to have been translated into Norwegian at some point between c.1300 and the late fifteenth century, when the Icelandic translation appears. No Norwegian version survives — but the Icelandic manuscript is thought to have been a translation of a Norwegian original because of the use of certain vocabulary items and the spellings of certain words. This evidence is summarised nicely in reviews of Larsen’s book (see Gordon 1933). Henning Larsen even suggests that the entire Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany was prepared in Norway itself, perhaps at Munkeliv Abbey in Bergen, for or by one Thorleifur Björnsson, whom Larsen calls ‘well nigh the most prominent man in Iceland ca.1480’ (Larsen 1926:392). Björnsson is mentioned by name in the manuscript.

In any case, the Old Icelandic Libellus contains a recipe for a sort of medieval Worcestershire sauce. The sauce — known in Latin in both the Middle Danish and Old Icelandic versions as salsum dominorum, or ‘Lords’ Sauce’ — is made from toasted bread, spices, and vinegar, and it’s said that it will keep in a cask for six months. The spices include the usual suspects: cinnamon, pepper, cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. Cloves come first. You can see the full text of the recipe in context in Figure 2, where I have highlighted the word for ‘cloves’:

Fig. 2 — The page of the Old Icelandic cookbook containing the recipe for Salsum Dominorum. Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23 D 43, f.xiiv [secondary series].

And here it is zoomed-in (Figure 3). The text and translation of the recipe for ‘Lords’ Sauce’ follow (based on Larsen 1931:131, 215):

Fig. 3 — The recipe for Salsum Dominorum in the Old Icelandic miscellany.

[…] Quomodo temperetur salsum dominorum et quam díu du-
rabít. || Geroforsnaglá skal taka. ⁊ mu-
skat cardemomium pipar. canel. íngifer. sitt jæmn
væge af hveriu. utan canel. skal vera jafn þycktt vid
alltt hitt annath. ⁊ svo micít steiktt braud sem alltt
þat er fyr er sagtt. ⁊ skera þat alltt saman. ⁊ mala med
stercku ediki. ⁊ lata j legil. þat er þeirra sals ⁊ dugar (4)
um eitt amisserí.

‘How to blend the Sauce of Lords and how long it lasts. One shall take cloves and nutmeg (5), cardamom, pepper, cinnamon, ginger — an equal weight of each except cinnamon, of which there shall be just as much as of all the others, and as much toasted (6) bread as all that has been said above. And he shall cut it all together and grind it in strong vinegar, and put it in a cask. That is their (7) sauce (8) and it is good for six months.’

Now: The word for ‘clove’ here is not gariofil(i)um but geroforsnaglá. This is a wonderfully Icelandic word for the spice. It’s also very clearly built on the model of the Middle Danish word for ‘clove’, gørfærs naghlæ, presumably by way of a Norwegian intermediary. The first element, gørfærs/gerofors, is a roundabout descendant of gariofilus (compare French girofle, Middle English gylofres), and the second means ‘nail’ (Old Icelandic nagl, modern Icelandic nögl).

Cloves were known as ‘nails’ in Old Icelandic, just as they were in many other medieval Afro-Eurasian languages, from Chinese and Malay to Old French and Middle Danish and even Old English — a common medieval metaphor, stretching all the way from the source of cloves in the small equatorial volcanic islands of Maluku on the edge of the Pacific to subarctic Iceland, another much larger but equally volcanic island in the North Atlantic (Figure 4).

Fig. 4 — If any cloves did in fact travel all the way to Iceland in the Middle Ages, they would have done so along a route a bit like this (but probably more tortuous and with more stops in reality).

Cubeb (‘Cubile’) in the Herbal

Other spices also appear in the manuscript, of course, many of them in the Old Icelandic version of Henrik Harpestræng’s Yrtebok (‘herbal’). These include cubebs, which we looked at in Harpestræng’s text in the aforementioned post on spices in Middle Danish. In Middle Danish cubebs were known as kobebæ or cobebæ. This isn’t so far removed from Old French quibibe or even kubāba (كبابة), the Arabic source of words for ‘cubeb’ in the languages of medieval Europe. In the Old Icelandic text, though, the word for ‘cubeb’ is Cubile (Figure 5). This is clearly a defect incurred during copying, whether in the Icelandic or Norwegian versions. The cubeb was evidently not such a common spice north of Jutland.

Fig. 5 — ‘Cubile’ , a misspelling of ‘cubeb’, in the Old Icelandic miscellany. Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23 D 43, f.xiir [primary series].

I’m not sure whether any cloves actually did make it to Iceland (although archaeology might be of some assistance there). But the words in the Old Icelandic Medical Miscellany are remarkable because they are evidence of the medieval clove trade at the greatest-known distance from the source of cloves. Cloves may have been traded to Greenland, or even, theoretically, brought to North America by Leif Erikson: the oldest reference to cloves in Old English, found in a manuscript written during the period of Norse settlement in England, antedates Erikson’s voyage to Vinland. But we have no evidence of cloves travelling so far, and no strong basis for believing that it happened. The gariofilium and geroforsnaglá in MS 23 D 43 represent the greatest distance knowledge of cloves ever appears to have travelled before the Columbian exchange.

What we are looking at here are echoes of the spice trade — recipes that would doubtless have been borderline fantastical to the average Icelander in c.1480, and probably even to wealthy ones. Still, these things (clove, nutmeg, even ‘cubile’) must have turned up now and then. The North Atlantic was certainly not outside the wider medieval Afro-Eurasian economy. But, further: it wasn’t outside the wider medieval Afro-Eurasian cultural space, in which knowledge and belief could travel vast distances even when other more tangible things didn’t. That fifteenth-century Icelanders might have had a word for ‘clove’ is ultimately no stranger than that they might have had a word for ‘lion’ — which they indubitably did (leó).

Thanks again to Dr. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, without whose assistance I would not have been able to write about this interesting topic.

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A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022.

NOTES

(1) A sort of rhubarb candy.
(2) Larsen translated this as ‘anetum’, which isn’t wrong per se. But the plant is usually known as ‘dill’ in English.
(3) Larsen went for ‘serpillum’ here, but again this plant has an English common name.
(4) Dugar (from duga ‘to help, aid, support; do, suffice’) is missing from Larsen’s transcription, but the translation nonetheless includes the idea.
(5) Larsen translated muskat here as ‘mace’. I’d say that it’s more likely nutmeg than mace. Either way, like cloves, this substance also came from (a different set of) small islands in what is now eastern Indonesia.
(6) Larsen has ‘baked’ here, but the Old Icelandic meaning is more like ‘roasted’ (going by Geir Tómasson Zoëga’s 1910 Concise Old Icelandic Dictionary)— or, per the Middle Danish version, ‘toasted’.
(7) Larsen points out that the ‘their’ here (Icelandic: þeirra) appears to refer to the Lords of the title/description. The Danish version has hærræ ‘lordly’ here; the Icelandic translator must have been confused by the similarity of the words.
(8) Larsen translates sals here as ‘salt’. The Old Icelandic word for ‘salt’ is salt; sals does not exist in Old Icelandic, and it must be an Icelandic adaptation of the salsum in salsum dominorum ‘Lords’ sauce’. Thus: ‘their sauce’.

REFERENCES

Gordon, E. V. 1933. Reviewed work: An Old Icelandic medical miscellany by Henning Larsen. Medium ævum. 2(1):74–81.

Grewe, Rudolf, and Hieatt, Constance B. 2001. Libellus de arte coquinaria. An early northern cookery book. Phoenix: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Larsen, Henning. 1926. MS Royal Irish Academy 23 D 43. Modern philology. 23(4):385–392.

Larsen, Henning (ed). 1931. Old Icelandic medical miscellany. Oslo: Det norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo.