Medieval literature and maps were filled with strange lands that people believed were real. Some originated in legends, while others may have been distorted descriptions of genuine places. Explorers spent centuries searching for several of them, but their true locations were never established. Here is our list of fifteen legendary medieval places you won’t be able to visit.
1. Camelot
King Arthur entering Camelot, depicted in an Italian manuscript -British Library MS Additional 12228 fol. 221v
Arthurian tales are set across Britain, sometimes in recognisable locations and sometimes in entirely fictional ones. Camelot first appeared in the late twelfth-century French romance Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart by Chrétien de Troyes. It was initially mentioned only briefly, but thirteenth-century French romances developed it into King Arthur’s principal castle and the centre of his legendary court.
Over the centuries, numerous places have been proposed as the inspiration for Camelot. Suggested locations include Cadbury Castle in Somerset, Caerleon in Wales and Winchester in southern England. These associations have helped connect Arthurian legend with real landscapes, but no convincing historical or archaeological evidence has established that Camelot itself ever existed.
2. The Kingdom of Prester John
Prester John enthroned in northeast Africa, from a map by Diogo Homem (1521–1576)
During the twelfth century, stories spread through Europe about Prester John, a powerful Christian priest-king who supposedly ruled a wealthy kingdom somewhere beyond the Islamic world. One of the earliest surviving accounts appears in the chronicle of Otto of Freising, who heard in 1145 that this eastern ruler had defeated Muslim forces and intended to aid Christians in the Holy Land. The legend became even more popular after the circulation of the Letter of Prester John around 1165. Purportedly written by the ruler himself, it described an enormous kingdom filled with riches, strange creatures and extraordinary marvels.
Europeans initially searched for Prester John’s kingdom in India and Central Asia, where Christian communities had long existed. Pope Alexander III even sent a letter to the supposed ruler in 1177, although his messenger apparently never returned with a reply. After Europeans failed to find the kingdom in Asia, they began associating Prester John with Christian Ethiopia. Ethiopia was a genuine and powerful Christian state, but its rulers did not use the name or title of Prester John. The legendary kingdom was ultimately a European invention shaped by fragmentary reports, religious hopes and limited knowledge of Asia and Africa.
3. The Peach Blossom Spring
A painting of the subject “The Peach Blossom Spring” by Qiu Ying (1494–1552)
The Peach Blossom Spring comes from a story written by the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming in AD 421. It follows a fisherman who travels along a stream surrounded by blossoming peach trees and discovers a narrow opening in the mountains. Beyond it lies a fertile, peaceful settlement whose inhabitants explain that their ancestors had fled the wars of the Qin dynasty centuries earlier. Isolated from the outside world, they know nothing of the political upheavals and changing dynasties that followed.
After enjoying their hospitality, the fisherman leaves and marks his route so that he can return. When he later leads officials towards the settlement, however, its entrance cannot be found. Other people also search for it without success. The story remained highly influential throughout medieval China, inspiring poetry, paintings and later accounts of hidden communities. The Peach Blossom Spring became a lasting symbol of an ideal society protected from warfare, political disorder and the pressures of the outside world.
4. Hy-Brasil
Brasil as shown in relation to Ireland on a map by Abraham Ortelius (1572)
Medieval maps frequently included islands said to lie beyond the familiar coastlines of Europe, even when their existence had never been confirmed. One of the most enduring was Hy-Brasil, a phantom island supposedly located in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. An island named Bracile appeared on a nautical chart produced by the cartographer Angelino Dulcert around 1325, and Hy-Brasil continued to appear on maps for centuries.
In Irish legend, Hy-Brasil was hidden by mist and became visible only once every seven years, making it difficult or impossible to reach. Its repeated appearance on maps encouraged sailors to search for it, with expeditions leaving Bristol in 1480 and 1481 in hopes of finding the island. Later travellers also claimed to have seen or visited it, but none produced convincing evidence. As Atlantic waters were mapped more accurately, Hy-Brasil was gradually removed from charts, becoming one of history’s best-known phantom islands.
5. Cockaigne
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Land of Cockaigne”, 1567.
Cockaigne was an imaginary land of abundance and idleness that appeared in medieval French and English literature. Its inhabitants never needed to work, food and drink were endlessly available, and ordinary social rules were overturned. Different versions described houses made from cakes, rivers flowing with wine, cooked animals ready to be eaten and skies that rained cheese. Unlike the spiritual rewards promised by Heaven, Cockaigne offered an earthly paradise centred on physical comfort and pleasure.
These exaggerated descriptions made Cockaigne both a comic fantasy and a satire of medieval society. In a world where hunger, hard labour and social inequality were familiar realities, it imagined a place where scarcity disappeared and the established order was reversed. The legend remained popular beyond the Middle Ages and inspired later works of literature and art, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1567 painting ‘The Land of Cockaigne’. In English, the imaginary country also became known as “Cuckoo-land”, a name for an impossible or foolishly idealistic place.
6. The Islands of Waqwaq
The Queen of the island of Waqwaq, from an 18th-century mauscript – Walters MS W.659
Medieval Arabic and Persian writers described the mysterious islands of Waqwaq as lying at the distant edges of the known world. Their position varied considerably: some geographers placed them off East Africa, while others located them beyond China in the eastern seas. The name may have preserved distorted reports about Madagascar, Indonesia or Japan, but no identification has been conclusively established. Waqwaq consequently occupied an uncertain space between genuine geographical knowledge and imaginative literature.
Accounts of the islands became increasingly fantastic. Some described a wealthy kingdom ruled by a woman, while others told of a remarkable tree whose human-shaped fruit cried “waqwaq” when it ripened and fell. The islands appeared in geographical works and collections of wonders, including writings associated with the thirteenth-century Persian scholar al-Qazwini.
7. Thule
The island of Thule depicted in the Carta Marina
The story of Thule began in antiquity rather than the Middle Ages. Around 320 BC, the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia described a distant northern land located beyond Britain, although his original account has not survived. Later Greek and Roman writers repeated his story, portraying Thule as the northernmost edge of the known world. Its precise location was never clear, and modern scholars have proposed Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland and other parts of the North Atlantic.
Medieval writers inherited the mystery from ancient geography. As European knowledge of the North expanded, some identified Thule with Iceland, while others continued to treat it as a separate island somewhere beyond Britain. The expression Ultima Thule, meaning “farthest Thule”, also came to signify any extremely remote place beyond the limits of the familiar world. Thule may therefore have originated as a description of a genuine northern location, but its identity became so uncertain that medieval mapmakers and writers transformed it into a largely legendary land.
8. Ryūgū-jō, the Dragon Palace
Depiction of the palace from a Japanese watercolor from late 16th or early 17th century
Ryūgū-jō was the magnificent palace of the sea god in Japanese tradition. Stories about a human visiting the sea god’s distant realm appeared in Japan’s earliest surviving written works, including the eighth-century Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. The palace later became closely associated with Urashima Tarō, a fisherman who traveled to another world ruled by the sea god and his daughter. What seemed like a short visit there lasted for generations in the human world.
Medieval versions of the Urashima story appeared in illustrated otogizōshi, or short narrative tales, during the Muromachi period. In these accounts, Urashima reaches the Dragon Palace and is shown gardens representing the four seasons. When he eventually returns home, he discovers that centuries have passed and everyone he knew has disappeared. The palace’s precise nature changed over time: some early versions placed it on the distant island of Hōrai, while later tradition increasingly imagined Ryūgū-jō as a splendid kingdom beneath the sea.
9. Kvenland
Possible location of Kvenland – Wikimedia Commons
Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, several northern European sources referred to a region called Kvenland, although its location and political character remain uncertain. The earliest surviving account appears in the late ninth-century Old English adaptation of the Roman historian Orosius. It incorporates geographical information supplied by Ohthere, a Norwegian traveller who visited the court of King Alfred the Great. Ohthere placed Kvenland somewhere beyond the mountains separating northern Norway from lands to the east and described conflict between the Kvens and the Norwegians:
The Kvens sometimes make depredations on the Northmen over the mountain, and sometimes the Northmen on them; there are very large meres [freshwater] amongst the mountains, and the Kvens carry their ships over land into the meres, and thence make depredations on the Northmen; they have very little ships, and very light.
Later sources, including Egil’s Saga and the Historia Norwegiae, also mention the Kvens or Kvenland, sometimes portraying it as a kingdom with its own rulers. Historians have proposed locations around the Gulf of Bothnia and in what is now northern Finland and Sweden, but no single identification has been proven. Kvenland was probably based on a genuine region or population rather than an entirely imaginary country, yet the scarcity and ambiguity of the surviving evidence have left its exact identity unresolved.
10. The Kingdom of the Amazons
Amazons at battle – British Library MS Additional 15268 fol. 123r
Ancient Greek writers described the Amazons as a society of warrior women living beyond the familiar boundaries of the Mediterranean world. Medieval writers inherited these stories and continued searching for a geographical home for them. Depending on the source, the Kingdom of the Amazons could be located in northern Asia, near the Caucasus, in India or in Africa. The Amazons also appeared in medieval versions of the Alexander Romance, in which Alexander the Great encountered their powerful queen and her army.
The kingdom became a recurring feature of medieval travel literature and cartography. Some accounts described a land governed entirely by women, while others claimed that men were admitted only at certain times to ensure the continuation of the population. Its shifting location allowed the kingdom to remain plausible as European knowledge of distant regions changed. No such state was ever found, but the Amazons continued to occupy medieval maps and literature as examples of a society in which familiar ideas about gender, warfare and political authority were reversed.
11. Suddene, Westernesse and Reynes
The opening of King Horn in Bodleian Library, MS. Laud. Misc 108 fol. 219v
The thirteenth-century Middle English romance King Horn unfolds across three kingdoms whose geography is only vaguely connected to the British Isles. Suddene is the homeland of Horn, a young prince whose father is killed when foreign invaders seize the kingdom. Horn is placed in a boat with his companions and eventually reaches Westernesse, where he is welcomed by King Ailmar and falls in love with the king’s daughter, Rymenhild. Reynes is ruled by King Mody, whom Rymenhild is later pressured to marry while Horn is living in exile.
Scholars have tried to connect these kingdoms with real places, but the poem provides inconsistent directions and few dependable geographical details. Suddene has been variously associated with the Isle of Man, Sussex, Cornwall and Devon, while Westernesse has been linked to areas including the Wirral and the Isle of Man. One interpretation places Reynes in Furness in northwestern England. None of these identifications is conclusive, and the kingdoms are best understood as fictional settings assembled from recognisable elements of Britain and Ireland. The name Westernesse later became especially famous when J.R.R. Tolkien adopted it as another name for Númenor in his fictional world.
12. Gates of Alexander
Dhu al-Qarnayn building a wall with the help of jinn to keep away Gog and Magog. Persian miniature from a book of Falnama copied for the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524–1576), currently preserved in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.
Medieval legends claimed that Alexander the Great had constructed an enormous wall or gate across a mountain pass in the Caucasus. Its purpose was to imprison Gog and Magog, mysterious peoples mentioned in biblical and Islamic traditions, along with other threatening nations believed to inhabit the distant north. According to apocalyptic interpretations of the story, these peoples would eventually break through the barrier and spread across the world shortly before the end of time. The gates consequently appeared in medieval literature and on maps as both a distant geographical landmark and a boundary containing dangerous unknown peoples.
Although no such structure was built by Alexander, the legend may have been inspired by genuine defences around the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. The most likely influence was Derbent, now in southern Russia, where walls and fortifications constructed by the Sasanian Persians during the fifth and sixth centuries guarded the narrow passage between the Caucasus Mountains and the sea. The Darial Pass between present-day Russia and Georgia and the Great Wall of Gorgan in Iran have also been associated with the story. These defences were built centuries after Alexander’s death, but their size and strategic locations allowed medieval writers to connect them with his legendary exploits.
13. Dundeya
From a 16th-century edition of The Travel of John de Mandeville
Written during the fourteenth century, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presented itself as the firsthand account of an English knight’s journeys through the Middle East and Asia. Its real author remains unknown, however, and much of the work was compiled from earlier histories, travel narratives and legends. One of its imaginary destinations was Dundeya, described as a large island south of Sri Lanka whose ruler controlled another 54 islands. These lands were supposedly inhabited by peoples with extraordinary physical characteristics:
In one, there is a race of great stature, like giants, foul and horrible to look at; they have one eye only, in the middle of their foreheads. They eat raw flesh and raw fish. In another part, there are ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder; their mouths are round, like a horseshoe, in the middle of their chest. In yet another part there are headless men whose eyes and mouths are on their backs….
Such beings were not invented entirely by Mandeville. Similar “monstrous races” had appeared in the writings of ancient authors such as Pliny the Elder and were repeatedly placed near the distant edges of medieval maps. By incorporating them into a supposed travel account, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presented old legends as eyewitness observations. The book became extremely popular and helped shape European ideas about Asia, even though no island corresponding to Dundeya, or the peoples supposedly living around it, was ever found.
14. Saint Brendan’s Island
St. Brendan close to the island which bore his name depicted on the Pizzigani chart of 1367.
Saint Brendan’s Island originated in the medieval legend of Brendan of Clonfert, a sixth-century Irish monk remembered for his voyages across the Atlantic. His journey was recounted in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot), which was probably composed by the ninth century. According to the story, Brendan and a group of monks sailed west in search of the Promised Land of the Saints. After years of travelling among mysterious islands, they reached a fertile land filled with trees and fruit, where they remained for 40 days before returning to Ireland.
The popularity of the Navigatio encouraged medieval mapmakers to treat this spiritual destination as a real Atlantic island. From around the thirteenth century onwards, Saint Brendan’s Island appeared on maps in various locations, including west of Ireland, near the Canary Islands and off the northwestern coast of Africa. Sailors reported possible sightings, and expeditions continued searching for it long after the Middle Ages. As the Atlantic was charted more accurately, the island gradually disappeared from maps, but its shifting position and long cartographic life made it one of Europe’s most enduring phantom islands.
15. Antillia, the Island of Seven Cities
Detail from the 1455 map of Bartolomeo Pareto. Antillia is the large island on the western edge.
Antillia was a phantom island believed to lie far west of Portugal and Spain in the Atlantic Ocean. According to an Iberian legend, seven Christian bishops fled across the sea with their followers during the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century. After reaching a distant island, each bishop founded a city, giving Antillia its alternative name: the Island of Seven Cities. Some versions claimed that the settlers destroyed their ships to ensure that they could never return.
Antillia in the 1424 map of Zuane Pizzigano
Antillia appeared clearly on the 1424 nautical chart of the Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano. It was depicted as a large rectangular island with seven bays and settlements, and similar representations appeared on numerous fifteenth-century maps. Sailors occasionally claimed to have sighted it, but expeditions failed to establish its location. As Europeans explored and mapped the Atlantic more accurately, Antillia disappeared from charts, although its name survived in the “Antilles,” the term later applied to the islands of the Caribbean.
These legendary places reveal how medieval people understood a world that was still only partially known. Some were literary inventions, while others grew from religious traditions, travelers’ reports or distorted descriptions of genuine locations. Although they could never be found as described, they shaped maps, stories and geographical knowledge across Europe, Asia and the Islamic world for centuries.
Medieval literature and maps were filled with strange lands that people believed were real. Some originated in legends, while others may have been distorted descriptions of genuine places. Explorers spent centuries searching for several of them, but their true locations were never established. Here is our list of fifteen legendary medieval places you won’t be able to visit.
1. Camelot
Arthurian tales are set across Britain, sometimes in recognisable locations and sometimes in entirely fictional ones. Camelot first appeared in the late twelfth-century French romance Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart by Chrétien de Troyes. It was initially mentioned only briefly, but thirteenth-century French romances developed it into King Arthur’s principal castle and the centre of his legendary court.
Over the centuries, numerous places have been proposed as the inspiration for Camelot. Suggested locations include Cadbury Castle in Somerset, Caerleon in Wales and Winchester in southern England. These associations have helped connect Arthurian legend with real landscapes, but no convincing historical or archaeological evidence has established that Camelot itself ever existed.
2. The Kingdom of Prester John
During the twelfth century, stories spread through Europe about Prester John, a powerful Christian priest-king who supposedly ruled a wealthy kingdom somewhere beyond the Islamic world. One of the earliest surviving accounts appears in the chronicle of Otto of Freising, who heard in 1145 that this eastern ruler had defeated Muslim forces and intended to aid Christians in the Holy Land. The legend became even more popular after the circulation of the Letter of Prester John around 1165. Purportedly written by the ruler himself, it described an enormous kingdom filled with riches, strange creatures and extraordinary marvels.
Europeans initially searched for Prester John’s kingdom in India and Central Asia, where Christian communities had long existed. Pope Alexander III even sent a letter to the supposed ruler in 1177, although his messenger apparently never returned with a reply. After Europeans failed to find the kingdom in Asia, they began associating Prester John with Christian Ethiopia. Ethiopia was a genuine and powerful Christian state, but its rulers did not use the name or title of Prester John. The legendary kingdom was ultimately a European invention shaped by fragmentary reports, religious hopes and limited knowledge of Asia and Africa.
3. The Peach Blossom Spring
The Peach Blossom Spring comes from a story written by the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming in AD 421. It follows a fisherman who travels along a stream surrounded by blossoming peach trees and discovers a narrow opening in the mountains. Beyond it lies a fertile, peaceful settlement whose inhabitants explain that their ancestors had fled the wars of the Qin dynasty centuries earlier. Isolated from the outside world, they know nothing of the political upheavals and changing dynasties that followed.
After enjoying their hospitality, the fisherman leaves and marks his route so that he can return. When he later leads officials towards the settlement, however, its entrance cannot be found. Other people also search for it without success. The story remained highly influential throughout medieval China, inspiring poetry, paintings and later accounts of hidden communities. The Peach Blossom Spring became a lasting symbol of an ideal society protected from warfare, political disorder and the pressures of the outside world.
4. Hy-Brasil
Medieval maps frequently included islands said to lie beyond the familiar coastlines of Europe, even when their existence had never been confirmed. One of the most enduring was Hy-Brasil, a phantom island supposedly located in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. An island named Bracile appeared on a nautical chart produced by the cartographer Angelino Dulcert around 1325, and Hy-Brasil continued to appear on maps for centuries.
In Irish legend, Hy-Brasil was hidden by mist and became visible only once every seven years, making it difficult or impossible to reach. Its repeated appearance on maps encouraged sailors to search for it, with expeditions leaving Bristol in 1480 and 1481 in hopes of finding the island. Later travellers also claimed to have seen or visited it, but none produced convincing evidence. As Atlantic waters were mapped more accurately, Hy-Brasil was gradually removed from charts, becoming one of history’s best-known phantom islands.
5. Cockaigne
Cockaigne was an imaginary land of abundance and idleness that appeared in medieval French and English literature. Its inhabitants never needed to work, food and drink were endlessly available, and ordinary social rules were overturned. Different versions described houses made from cakes, rivers flowing with wine, cooked animals ready to be eaten and skies that rained cheese. Unlike the spiritual rewards promised by Heaven, Cockaigne offered an earthly paradise centred on physical comfort and pleasure.
These exaggerated descriptions made Cockaigne both a comic fantasy and a satire of medieval society. In a world where hunger, hard labour and social inequality were familiar realities, it imagined a place where scarcity disappeared and the established order was reversed. The legend remained popular beyond the Middle Ages and inspired later works of literature and art, including Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1567 painting ‘The Land of Cockaigne’. In English, the imaginary country also became known as “Cuckoo-land”, a name for an impossible or foolishly idealistic place.
6. The Islands of Waqwaq
Medieval Arabic and Persian writers described the mysterious islands of Waqwaq as lying at the distant edges of the known world. Their position varied considerably: some geographers placed them off East Africa, while others located them beyond China in the eastern seas. The name may have preserved distorted reports about Madagascar, Indonesia or Japan, but no identification has been conclusively established. Waqwaq consequently occupied an uncertain space between genuine geographical knowledge and imaginative literature.
Accounts of the islands became increasingly fantastic. Some described a wealthy kingdom ruled by a woman, while others told of a remarkable tree whose human-shaped fruit cried “waqwaq” when it ripened and fell. The islands appeared in geographical works and collections of wonders, including writings associated with the thirteenth-century Persian scholar al-Qazwini.
7. Thule
The story of Thule began in antiquity rather than the Middle Ages. Around 320 BC, the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia described a distant northern land located beyond Britain, although his original account has not survived. Later Greek and Roman writers repeated his story, portraying Thule as the northernmost edge of the known world. Its precise location was never clear, and modern scholars have proposed Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, Shetland and other parts of the North Atlantic.
Medieval writers inherited the mystery from ancient geography. As European knowledge of the North expanded, some identified Thule with Iceland, while others continued to treat it as a separate island somewhere beyond Britain. The expression Ultima Thule, meaning “farthest Thule”, also came to signify any extremely remote place beyond the limits of the familiar world. Thule may therefore have originated as a description of a genuine northern location, but its identity became so uncertain that medieval mapmakers and writers transformed it into a largely legendary land.
8. Ryūgū-jō, the Dragon Palace
Ryūgū-jō was the magnificent palace of the sea god in Japanese tradition. Stories about a human visiting the sea god’s distant realm appeared in Japan’s earliest surviving written works, including the eighth-century Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. The palace later became closely associated with Urashima Tarō, a fisherman who traveled to another world ruled by the sea god and his daughter. What seemed like a short visit there lasted for generations in the human world.
Medieval versions of the Urashima story appeared in illustrated otogizōshi, or short narrative tales, during the Muromachi period. In these accounts, Urashima reaches the Dragon Palace and is shown gardens representing the four seasons. When he eventually returns home, he discovers that centuries have passed and everyone he knew has disappeared. The palace’s precise nature changed over time: some early versions placed it on the distant island of Hōrai, while later tradition increasingly imagined Ryūgū-jō as a splendid kingdom beneath the sea.
9. Kvenland
Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, several northern European sources referred to a region called Kvenland, although its location and political character remain uncertain. The earliest surviving account appears in the late ninth-century Old English adaptation of the Roman historian Orosius. It incorporates geographical information supplied by Ohthere, a Norwegian traveller who visited the court of King Alfred the Great. Ohthere placed Kvenland somewhere beyond the mountains separating northern Norway from lands to the east and described conflict between the Kvens and the Norwegians:
The Kvens sometimes make depredations on the Northmen over the mountain, and sometimes the Northmen on them; there are very large meres [freshwater] amongst the mountains, and the Kvens carry their ships over land into the meres, and thence make depredations on the Northmen; they have very little ships, and very light.
Later sources, including Egil’s Saga and the Historia Norwegiae, also mention the Kvens or Kvenland, sometimes portraying it as a kingdom with its own rulers. Historians have proposed locations around the Gulf of Bothnia and in what is now northern Finland and Sweden, but no single identification has been proven. Kvenland was probably based on a genuine region or population rather than an entirely imaginary country, yet the scarcity and ambiguity of the surviving evidence have left its exact identity unresolved.
10. The Kingdom of the Amazons
Ancient Greek writers described the Amazons as a society of warrior women living beyond the familiar boundaries of the Mediterranean world. Medieval writers inherited these stories and continued searching for a geographical home for them. Depending on the source, the Kingdom of the Amazons could be located in northern Asia, near the Caucasus, in India or in Africa. The Amazons also appeared in medieval versions of the Alexander Romance, in which Alexander the Great encountered their powerful queen and her army.
The kingdom became a recurring feature of medieval travel literature and cartography. Some accounts described a land governed entirely by women, while others claimed that men were admitted only at certain times to ensure the continuation of the population. Its shifting location allowed the kingdom to remain plausible as European knowledge of distant regions changed. No such state was ever found, but the Amazons continued to occupy medieval maps and literature as examples of a society in which familiar ideas about gender, warfare and political authority were reversed.
11. Suddene, Westernesse and Reynes
The thirteenth-century Middle English romance King Horn unfolds across three kingdoms whose geography is only vaguely connected to the British Isles. Suddene is the homeland of Horn, a young prince whose father is killed when foreign invaders seize the kingdom. Horn is placed in a boat with his companions and eventually reaches Westernesse, where he is welcomed by King Ailmar and falls in love with the king’s daughter, Rymenhild. Reynes is ruled by King Mody, whom Rymenhild is later pressured to marry while Horn is living in exile.
Scholars have tried to connect these kingdoms with real places, but the poem provides inconsistent directions and few dependable geographical details. Suddene has been variously associated with the Isle of Man, Sussex, Cornwall and Devon, while Westernesse has been linked to areas including the Wirral and the Isle of Man. One interpretation places Reynes in Furness in northwestern England. None of these identifications is conclusive, and the kingdoms are best understood as fictional settings assembled from recognisable elements of Britain and Ireland. The name Westernesse later became especially famous when J.R.R. Tolkien adopted it as another name for Númenor in his fictional world.
12. Gates of Alexander
Medieval legends claimed that Alexander the Great had constructed an enormous wall or gate across a mountain pass in the Caucasus. Its purpose was to imprison Gog and Magog, mysterious peoples mentioned in biblical and Islamic traditions, along with other threatening nations believed to inhabit the distant north. According to apocalyptic interpretations of the story, these peoples would eventually break through the barrier and spread across the world shortly before the end of time. The gates consequently appeared in medieval literature and on maps as both a distant geographical landmark and a boundary containing dangerous unknown peoples.
Although no such structure was built by Alexander, the legend may have been inspired by genuine defences around the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. The most likely influence was Derbent, now in southern Russia, where walls and fortifications constructed by the Sasanian Persians during the fifth and sixth centuries guarded the narrow passage between the Caucasus Mountains and the sea. The Darial Pass between present-day Russia and Georgia and the Great Wall of Gorgan in Iran have also been associated with the story. These defences were built centuries after Alexander’s death, but their size and strategic locations allowed medieval writers to connect them with his legendary exploits.
13. Dundeya
Written during the fourteenth century, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presented itself as the firsthand account of an English knight’s journeys through the Middle East and Asia. Its real author remains unknown, however, and much of the work was compiled from earlier histories, travel narratives and legends. One of its imaginary destinations was Dundeya, described as a large island south of Sri Lanka whose ruler controlled another 54 islands. These lands were supposedly inhabited by peoples with extraordinary physical characteristics:
In one, there is a race of great stature, like giants, foul and horrible to look at; they have one eye only, in the middle of their foreheads. They eat raw flesh and raw fish. In another part, there are ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder; their mouths are round, like a horseshoe, in the middle of their chest. In yet another part there are headless men whose eyes and mouths are on their backs….
Such beings were not invented entirely by Mandeville. Similar “monstrous races” had appeared in the writings of ancient authors such as Pliny the Elder and were repeatedly placed near the distant edges of medieval maps. By incorporating them into a supposed travel account, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville presented old legends as eyewitness observations. The book became extremely popular and helped shape European ideas about Asia, even though no island corresponding to Dundeya, or the peoples supposedly living around it, was ever found.
14. Saint Brendan’s Island
Saint Brendan’s Island originated in the medieval legend of Brendan of Clonfert, a sixth-century Irish monk remembered for his voyages across the Atlantic. His journey was recounted in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot), which was probably composed by the ninth century. According to the story, Brendan and a group of monks sailed west in search of the Promised Land of the Saints. After years of travelling among mysterious islands, they reached a fertile land filled with trees and fruit, where they remained for 40 days before returning to Ireland.
The popularity of the Navigatio encouraged medieval mapmakers to treat this spiritual destination as a real Atlantic island. From around the thirteenth century onwards, Saint Brendan’s Island appeared on maps in various locations, including west of Ireland, near the Canary Islands and off the northwestern coast of Africa. Sailors reported possible sightings, and expeditions continued searching for it long after the Middle Ages. As the Atlantic was charted more accurately, the island gradually disappeared from maps, but its shifting position and long cartographic life made it one of Europe’s most enduring phantom islands.
15. Antillia, the Island of Seven Cities
Antillia was a phantom island believed to lie far west of Portugal and Spain in the Atlantic Ocean. According to an Iberian legend, seven Christian bishops fled across the sea with their followers during the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century. After reaching a distant island, each bishop founded a city, giving Antillia its alternative name: the Island of Seven Cities. Some versions claimed that the settlers destroyed their ships to ensure that they could never return.
Antillia appeared clearly on the 1424 nautical chart of the Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano. It was depicted as a large rectangular island with seven bays and settlements, and similar representations appeared on numerous fifteenth-century maps. Sailors occasionally claimed to have sighted it, but expeditions failed to establish its location. As Europeans explored and mapped the Atlantic more accurately, Antillia disappeared from charts, although its name survived in the “Antilles,” the term later applied to the islands of the Caribbean.
These legendary places reveal how medieval people understood a world that was still only partially known. Some were literary inventions, while others grew from religious traditions, travelers’ reports or distorted descriptions of genuine locations. Although they could never be found as described, they shaped maps, stories and geographical knowledge across Europe, Asia and the Islamic world for centuries.
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