"Thær boer eeynh manh secundum [== ij ?][246] eyn Gronelandsz aa, ooc Spieldebedh mundhe hanyd heyde; meer hawer han aff nidefildh, een hanh hawer flesk hinth feyde. Nordh um driuer sandhin naa new new."
(There lives a man (in ?) a Greenland river, and Spieldebedh is his name; he has more vermin (?) than he has fat bacon, etc.)
The verse, as pointed out by Axel Olrik, is evidently an imitation or travesty of the folk-songs, and, as Karl Aubert has shown,[247] its prototype must certainly have been the first verse of the same folk-song that is now known in Sweden by the name of "Kung Speleman":
"Dher bodde een kjempe vid Helsingborg, Kung Speleman månde han heta, Visst hade han mera boda sölf, Än andra flesket dhet feta. Uren drifver noran, och hafvet sunnan för noran."
(There lived a giant by Helsingborg, King Fiddler was his name. Sure he had greater store of silver Than others of fat bacon, etc.)
This method of fabricating geographical names adopted by Clavus recalls the designation of the notes in the mediæval scale, for which the words of a Latin hymn were used, and it seems likely that this is what he has imitated. But his mystification, with all these strange names which no one in Southern Europe understood, and which in course of time underwent many corruptions, has caused a good deal of trouble; many intelligent men have racked their brains to discover learned etymological interpretations of their origin, until Björnbo's lucky find of the later text of Clavus solved the riddle.
[Sidenote: Different views of Clavus's maps and their origin]
Björnbo and Petersen, who by their valuable work on Claudius Clavus with a reproduction of this text have the credit of throwing light on the relation between his first and second maps, have put forward the view that Clavus must have made his first map (the Nancy map) with its Latin text in Italy; but curiously enough they think he entirely rejected the Italian compass-charts as unsuitable for the representation of the North, and constructed his delineation of the northern regions independently of them, as an addition to Ptolemy's coast-lines, simply from information he had derived from northern sources. After this we are to suppose that, in order to extend his geographical knowledge, he went back to Denmark; and since the authors place reliance on Clavus's assertion (in his later text) that he had seen the places himself, they even credit him with having made a voyage of geographical exploration, first to Norway (Trondhjem) and then to Greenland. And then he is supposed to have drawn his later map, and written the text for it (in Latin), in the North.