''The old Norse people had another name for the maelstrom,'' Dr. In any case, 19th-century writers like Poe based their factual errors on old accounts handed down from the Vikings and their kin. ''But even though Poe never visited Norway, his description of the coastal landscape is otherwise astonishingly accurate.'' The horrifying conic eddy or funnel described by Poe in his 1841 short story ''A Descent into the Maelstrom'' could never exist, he said. An ancient legend has it that a pair of magical millstones were once dropped into the sea off the coast of Norway and that their eternal grinding of sea salt produces the lethal eddies of the maelstrom. The word maelstrom, a synonym in English for a tumult, literal or figurative, is believed to be derived from the Dutch word ''malen,'' to grind. Their research is reported in the current issue of the journal Nature. Bjorn Gjevik and two of his students in mathematics at the University of Oslo, Halvard Moe and Atle Ommundsen, concluded that although there is no funnel-like whirlpool within the maelstrom, the dangers posed by currents and winds in the region are formidable. Now Norwegian scientists have developed the first comprehensive mathematical model of currents and sea levels within the Norwegian maelstrom.

Over many centuries it has claimed countless lives among the hapless mariners who ventured into it at dangerous times in the tidal cycle. Moreover, it is known today that neither Norway's maelstrom nor any other oceanic eddy ever creates a whirling funnel of the kind imagined by Verne and many earlier writers.īut although the menace of Norway's maelstrom was greatly exaggerated by such writers as Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and others, the Moskstraumen, as the maelstrom is called in Norwegian, is real. The popular fascination once inspired by voracious, whirling funnels of sea water has been supplanted in recent times by fascination with black holes, whose cosmic appetites are far grander than those of mere oceanic whirlpools.

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