Normans probably brought the belief with them from Scandinavia), the Arab geographer al-Idrisi in his famous Tabula Rogeriana mentioned Irlandah-al-Kabirah (Great Ireland). According to him, "from the extremity of Iceland to that of Great Ireland," the sailing time was "one day." Although historians note that both al-Idrisi and the Norse tend to understate distances, the only location this reference is thought to have possibly pointed to, must likely have been in Greenland. Hauksbók The Hauksbók states that the inhabitants of Hvítramannaland were albani, meaning people with white hair and skin. 16th-century Iceland In a 16th-century Icelandic text, a chart had apparently been made of the land; Sir Erlend Thordson had obtained from abroad the geographical chart of that Albania, or land of the White men, which is situated opposite Vinland the good, of which mention has been before made in this little book, and which the merchants formerly called Hibernia Major or Great Ireland, and lies, as has been said, to the west of Ireland proper. This chart had held accurately all those tracts of land, and the boundaries of Markland, Einfœtingjaland, and little Helluland, together with Greenland, to the west of it, where apparently begins the good Terra Florida. Location hypotheses Kirsten Seaver identified the land as a fabled country, which had arisen on the background of the faded knowledge of lands in the far western ocean by Icelanders. Carl Christian Rafn positioned Great Ireland in Chesapeake Bay. Rafn based his identification on Shawnee Amerindian legends of a race described as "white men who used iron instruments". These legends he connected to the description of the inhabitants of Greater Ireland as being white people who carried poles. Other sources place Great Ireland in Newfoundland, Canada. Author Farley Mowat proposed that Great Ireland was on the western shore of Newfoundland, in the vicinity of St.George's Bay, and was populated by Papar who had fled first Iceland and then Greenland escaping Norse invaders. More recent research agrees with the early assessment already proposed by Fridtjof Nansen in 1911 and sees Hvítramannaland as a purely mythological country based on a Norse reception of Irish geographical myths during the Viking Age. See also Azores Hy-Brasil – mythical island to the west of Ireland. Footnotes References Primary sources Secondary sources Egeler, Matthias (2015). "Hvítramannaland," in: Heinrich Beck; Sebastian Brather; Dieter Geuenich; Wilhelm Heizmann; Steffen Patzold; Heiko Steuer (eds.): Germanische Altertumskunde Online (GAO). Berlin –