Frederick York Powell

“ Liddell, agreed to print and publish the book, and, after some months in London, Vígfússon moved to Oxford in 1866, where he resided till his death. Without transcribers or assistants, with the help of his own collections of ‘Fritzner’ then appearing in fasciculi, and a miserably inadequate mass of materials supplied by the persons employed at Copenhagen by Richard Cleasby, Vígfússon finished the Oxford Icelandic-English Dictionary in 1873. ”

“ From 1866 to 1889 he was almost incessantly occupied with his edition of the ‘Landnáma-bóc’ and other origines Islandiæ, and with the duties of his readership, for he had been appointed reader in Icelandic in the university of Oxford in 1884, a position created for him. He made a long stay at Copenhagen, working at the Arna-Maguxan Icelandic manuscripts. In 1886 he went to the Isle of Man, and published in the ‘Manx Note Book’ his readings of the runic monuments there. ”

“ The next three years were occupied with ‘Sturlunga Saga,’ 1878, to which was affixed, as prolegomena, a complete literary history of old northern literature, with full account of the extant manuscript material, a piece of work he had long planned out and at one time hoped to produce as the introduction to his dictionary. ”