The Cottoniana, an Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi

Here is a pencil reproduction I drew of a wondrous Anglo-Saxon world map from the Cotton library. You’re free to do whatever you want with this, and with a high-resolution version that I’m also sharing.

You can read more about this map and the Cotton library in my book, though I will also point out this page at Jim Siebold’s Ancient Maps web site. As much as I’m trying to promote my own project, here, Mr. Siebold was kind enough to bless my excerpting some of his comments about the map; if his permission was not strictly necessary it still offers a fine counter-example to the kind of miserliness at which I’m trying to thumb my nose.

As explained in this previous post. Otherwise…

Yeah, again, this one was plenty of work. Duh. I will note that most of the text here is gibberish, standing in for whatever is written on the real map. Even with a high-resolution photo the text is very difficult to make sense of—I think most of it is Latin—and for my purposes it didn’t seem like it would make any difference.