What Scott is referring to here is William Guthrie’s Norway chapter in A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World (published in multiple editions following the death of the author in 1770). Guthrie extols the “wonderful animals which, according to some modern accounts, inhabit the Norwegian seas.” Among those creatures is the “sea-snake, . . . one of the most remarkable and perhaps the best attested.” Bishop Hans Egede’s famous 1734 encounter with “a large and frightful sea-monster” and other sightings qualify as “modern.” Olaus’s fabled sixteenth-century monster does not. It goes without mention. Scott concludes his note by debunking the sea-serpent story of a respected mariner he knew: the sighted beast, a hundred feet (30.4m) in length, with “the wild mane and fiery eyes which old writers ascribe to the monster,” was most likely a “good Norway log” in the misty waters. One of the “old writers” in question was most certainly Olaus, whose serpent description Scott had earlier included in a quoted footnote to “The Mermaid” in the third volume of his 1803 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. In later editions of his collection, Scott added, “A sort of sea-snake immense enough to have given rise to this tradition, was thrown ashore upon one of the Orkney Isles in 1808.”