Throughout the Middle Ages there have been several visions of the northern periphery of the inhabited world, which appeared on maps and in narrative geographical descriptions. The archaic concept of the islands of the North interacted with ideas of a large peninsula or even a continent on the other side of the Arctic Ocean. Any contact with an unknown land in the Arctic Ocean including terse accounts about the discovery of Svalbard at the end of the twelfth century and the persistent fifteenth-century rumors about an Arctic island newly discovered by the Russians had to be interpreted within the framework of these ideas. Most Arctic islands and peninsulas thus remained phantom realities derived from theory and myth – until competing histories of their discovery became arguments in international disputes over jurisdiction in the Arctic region.