Gislason, and of those foreign scholars in Scandinavia and Germany who have thrown themselves so heartily into the work of illustrating, publishing, and editing the sagas and poems (men like Munch, Bugge, Bergmann, Möbius, and Maurer, to name only a few), can only be referred to here.
Scientific works. The first modern scientific work is the Iter per patriam of Eggert Olafsson and Biarni Paulsson, which gives a careful and correct account of the physical peculiarities—fauna, flora, &c.—of the island as far as could be done at the date of its appearance, 1772. The island was first made known to “the world” by this book and by the sketch of Unno von Troil, a Swede, who accompanied Sir Joseph Banks to Iceland in 1772, and afterwards wrote a series of “letters” on the land and its literature, &c. This tour was the forerunner of an endless series of “travels,” of which those of Hooker (1809), Mackenzie (1810), Henderson (1818), Gaimard (1838-43), Paijkull (1867), and, lastly, that of Captain Burton, an excellent account of the land and people, crammed with information of every kind (1875), are the best.
The maps by Olson and his colleagues, by Gunnlaugson, and by the French Admiralty are good. Kälund's work on the historical geography of the island is valuable and interesting. Safn and other periodicals above mentioned contain many able papers on scientific and sociological matters. Iceland is an interesting field for the pathologist and physician, and numerous medical treatises, Icelandic and foreign, have attacked it. Dr Hjaltalin, the present medical director, is perhaps the best modern authority.
The cathedral high school merged into a college in 1801, which was fixed at Bessastad during its palmiest days (1805-46), and is now at Reykjavik. Among its lists of masters several distinguished names figure, for example, Sweinbiorn Egilsson, whose Homeric translations were issued as college “programs.” A law school has been recently formed at Reykjavik and a technical school at Mödruvellir. The museum and library, both at Reykjavik, still in the rudimentary state, are to be newly housed and extended.
Miscellaneous. Iceland is emphatically a land of proverbs, which occur on almost every page of the dictionary, while of folk-tales, those other keys to the people's heart, there is plentiful store. Early work in this direction was done by Jon Gudmundsson, Olaf the Old, and John Olafsson in the 17th century, who all put traditions on paper, and their labours have been completed by the magnificent collection of Jon Arnason (1862-64), who, inspired by the example of the Grimms, spent great toil on his self-imposed task. Many tales are but weak echoes of the sagas; many were family legends, many the old fairy tales we all know so well, dressed in a fresh garb suited to their new northern home; but, besides all these, there are a number of traditions and superstitions not found elsewhere, the mass of which is of indigenous growth and origin. Some of Arnason's collections have been put into English by Messrs J. G. G. Powell and E. Magnusson, and Sir G. Dasent.
A few translations of popular and famous books, such as the Arabian Nights, one or two classics, and a tale, Piltr og Stulka (“Lad and Lass”), 1850, complete the notabilities of Icelandic bibliography. Mr Lidderdale has prepared a list of Icelandic-printed books, which it is hoped may be published; the excellent Catalogus of Möbius is of use for dates, &c., of editions.
Unlike England and France, Iceland has had but one golden age of literature upon which all her fame must rest. Of its creations it has been truly said that they fill a place none others could take in the high ranks of Aryan classics. The noblest of them are distinguished by pure and strict form, noble heroic subject, and simple truthful self-control of style and treatment, free alike from overwrought sentiment or extravagant passion, and raised equally above euphemism and commonplace, but ever inspired by a weird Æschylean power, grim and tender, and splendid as that which breathes through those historical books of the Old Testament, to which alone should the masterpieces of Iceland s greatest writers be compared.
Language.
The relations of Icelandic to the other Teutonic tongues may be best shown by a chronological treatment. It presents the following anomalies:—on the one hand, it has a highly inflexional grammar, a pure vocabulary, and a simple syntax, points which would place it side by side with Gothic; but, on the other hand, it shows such strong marks of contraction and such deep phonetic changes, especially in the vowels, as can only be paralleled in the modern English. It is further noteworthy for its unity or lack of dialectic variation, and possesses exceptional advantages for the philologist in the complete series of documents dating from the 11th century downwards in which its history may be most accurately and minutely studied.
There is little doubt but that the Teutonic tribes of the 4th century all spoke one language, that, in fact, of which the remains of Ulfila (which may be supplemented by a few inscriptions, such as those of the Golden Horn and the earliest Danish rune-stones, and a few stray words preserved in classic authors) afford us such a noble specimen. The first differentiation occurred when the English colony separated in the 5th century from the parent stock, and, following its own course of development, already by the time of Bede presented many new and peculiar characteristics in form and vocabulary. With the changes which produced the High German dialects it does not behove us to deal here, so we may pass on to the Viking Tide (775-925), the results of which were felt over a wide area, and are evidenced by the changes which gave to the tongue of those tribes that took part in it a distinctly Scandinavian character.
Just as the earlier movement left its mark in Old English, so this one is clearly seen in the speech of the Scandinavian colonies of the West, especially in Icelandic, but it is still well marked in the Eastern Scandinavian dialects—Swedish, Danish, &c., as the following points common to all east and west, and marking them off clearly from all other Teutonic tongues, will show:—strong stem-contraction reducing all words as far as possible to a trochaic form; i-umlaut carried out very fully and consistently; the suffixing of the article; and a peculiar vocabulary which has chosen out of the common Teutonic stock certain words for daily use, rejecting others which are common to all the other sister tongues—e.g., eld for fire, ekkia for widow, gamol for old, cigi for not, ok for and, göra for do, taka for niman, &c. The later Danish rune-stones and those of Sweden, published by Wimmer, Säve, Dybeck, &c., will be the best documents for this stage of the Scandinavian tongue.
We may now leave the Eastern Scandinavian dialects to follow their own course, which has led them through a path not entirely dissimilar to that which English has taken, and confine ourselves to the Western Colonial dialects. Those in their earliest monuments, the rune-stones of Man, the coins of the “Danish” kings and earls in Ireland and England, the lays of the Western poets in the Edda collection, and the earliest poetry of such Icelandic bards as Egill and Kormak, exhibit certain idiosyncrasies which show them to have already started on their own career. Such are the u-umlaut, the loss of w before r and l, the simplification of the vowel system (all aggravations, as it were, of the Scandinavian peculiarities noticed above, while their vocabulary is, as one would expect, affected by the introduction of many English, Gaelic, and Latin words, especially those relating to ideas unknown in earlier heathen days, ecclesiastical terms, &c.). Of these western colonies we are only concerned with the most important, Iceland; the Orkneys and Hebrides have no linguistic monuments later than the Edda lays of the 10th and 11th, and epigonic poetry and rhymed gradus-jingles of the 12th century; the influence of the Danes on our dialects and book-English must be left to English philologists; while in Ireland only a few personal and local names now betray to the ear the former presence of the Ostman.
Earliest stage of Icelandic. The fact that one of the first Icelandic writers, c. 1120, Ari's contemporary, Thorodd, is a grammarian, and one of no mean power, is our greatest help towards ascertaining the phonesis of the tongue during the heroic age; and his evidence is supplemented by the Icelandic poets, whose strict adherence to metres, which depend for their effect on a delicate harmony of sound and a rigid observance of quantity, is absolutely to be trusted. Thorodd's scheme for the proper phonetic representation of Icelandic (which the English student may contrast with that of Orm, our first spelling reformer) is briefly as follows. The letters b, c, d, f, g, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, are used in their ordinary classic values (c always hard), the capitals B, K, D, F, G, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, being employed for the doubled letters bb, &c. (each consonant of these doubles was of course separately and distinctly pronounced as in Italian now, and, as Mr A. J. Ellis has proved, in Latin formerly); þ is used as in Old English for th; h for the aspirate pure or combined hl, hn, &c.; both these are of unvarying form; x for cs, gs, and ŋ for ng can only be found in medial and final positions. Thus we get twenty-eight consonants. The vowels, a, e, i, o, u, y, æ, œ long and short, have their ordinary values [pal. a, e, i, o, u, I, E, ǝi and aa, ee, &c.], and to them Thorodd has added ao [œ] long and short. All these vowels may also be nasalized, ã, ẽ, &c., making twenty-seven in all; i and u, whether consonantal or vocal, do not vary in form. The following points characterize the tongue at this period:—adherence to o in the terminations, right employment of the subjunctive, which has since gone completely out of use, retention of s in inflexion and the substantive verb. Quantity was strictly observed in speaking, and also accent, and no doubt people, as in Old England, spoke much more clearly, slowly, and energetically than they do now. The introduction of quantitative metres measured by syllables is no doubt to be ascribed to Celtic influence, as are the line-rhymes and assonances and rhyme-endings, which, as any reader of Snorri's Hatta-tal or Earl Rognwald's Hatta-lykill will see at the first glance, completely separated Icelandic poetry from the original Teutonic metric of the Continental rune-stones, of Beowulf, and of Havamal.
Thorodd's scheme was unfortunately never used in its strict completeness, but it is partly employed in the following MSS., which are of the highest authority for this era of the Icelandic:—Elucidarius, c. 1130, ed. facsimile; Libellus, c. 1150, ed. Möbius; the Law Scroll-fragments affixed by W. Finsen to the end of his ed. of Cod. Regius Grágás: the Stockholm Homilies, c. 1145, ed. Wisen; Physiologus, AM. 673, ed. facsimile; Agrip, c. 1185, ed.
