Regarding the first written reports of skiing, German ski historian and teacher Carl J. Luther writes in The British Ski Year Book, 1952, about tales of horse-footed men from the north:
‘…Roman writer [Pomponius] Mela (A.D. 50) and Pliny the Elder who… mention men with horses’ feet… Mela speaks quite briefly of some fabulous people, including the “Hippopodes who have horses’ feet.” And Pliny, in Book IV of his famous Historia naturalis, has not much more to say of them. “There are also said to be other (islands) in which men are born with the feet of horses, called Hippopodes.’ 3