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Columbia Encyclopedia: Fortunate Isles
or Isles of the Blest, in classical and Celtic legend, islands in the Western Ocean. There the souls of favored mortals were received by the gods and lived happily in a paradise. Belief in the islands long persisted, and the Canaries and the Madeira Islands were sometimes identified with them.


 
 
Wikipedia: Fortunate Isles

In the Fortunate Isles, also called the Isles (or Islands) of the Blessed (μακαρων νησοι makarôn nêsoi), heroes and other favored mortals in Greek mythology and Celtic mythology were received by the gods into a blissful paradise. These islands were thought to lie in the Western Ocean near the encircling River Oceanus; the Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde have sometimes been cited as possible matches.

Flavius Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana (book v.2) says "And they also say that the Islands of the Blessed are to be fixed by the limits of Libya where they rise towards the uninhabited promontory." In this geography Libya was considered to extend westwards through Mauretania "as far as the mouth of the river Salex, some nine hundred stadia, and beyond that point a further distance which no one can compute, because when you have passed this river Libya is a desert which no longer supports a population."

Ptolemy used these islands as the reference for the measurement of geographical longitude, and they continued to play the role of defining the prime meridian through the Middle Ages.[1] Modern geography names these islands as Macaronesia.

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Notes

  1. ^ John Kirtland Wright, "Notes on the Knowledge of Latitudes and Longitudes in the Middle Ages", Isis, 5 (1923): 75-98.

 
 

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Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fortunate Isles" Read more

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