Icelandic language

“ Icelandic prose is very near to the spoken language; it is rich in idiom and in conversation, and the artistic form given to it by writing men seems to follow easily from the natural growth of the spoken traditional tale.
By the early part of the thirteenth century most of the old stories had been written; and not only the Icelandic Sagas of the heroic age, but also the lives of the kings of Norway, which are best known in the work of Snorri, commonly called Heimskringla. ”

“ Both in vocabulary and syntax we find early, e.g. in the lawbook Jónsbók, printed in 1578 (-1580) , Danish exercising an important influence, as might be expected from political circumstances. In the 18th century, however, we meet with purist tendencies. As one of the leading men of this century may be mentioned the poet Eggert Ólafsson (d. 1768) , whose poems were not printed till 1832. Worthy of mention in the history of Modern Icelandic language are the learned societies which appeared in the same century, of which the first, under the name of “Hið ósýnilega,” was established in 1760. ”

“ Although, on account of the exceedingly conservative tendency of Icelandic orthography, the language of Modern Icelandic literature still seems to be almost identical with the language of the 17th century, it has in reality undergone a constant and active development, and, phonetically regarded, has changed considerably. ”

“ This list (and it contains but a few of the published sagas) shows the attention paid to the culture of letters in a remote corner of the world, at a time when the whole continent of Europe was sunk in barbarism and ignorance.—The second or modern period of Icelandic literature by no means commences with the termination of the old literature; a long time of utter mental inactivity followed, and the 15th and 16th centuries produced scarcely anything but a few unimportant religious books. In the 17th century the knowledge of the ancient literature and glory of the island began to revive. ”

“ Old Icelandic was spoken not only in Iceland, but also in Greenland, where Icelandic colonists lived for a lengthened period (983-about 1400) . Our knowledge of its character is almost exclusively Sources. derived from the remarkably voluminous literature, [13] dating from the middle of the 12th century, and written in the Latin alphabet, adapted to the special requirements of this language. Nothing is preserved of older runic literature. [14] Indeed, Old Icelandic possesses only very few runic monuments (about forty) , all of them almost worthless from a philological point of view. ”

“ Many other influences must have been at work, among which an interruption of intercourse created by natural obstacles or social conditions of various kinds would be of prime importance. If we take ethnic substrata as the main or sole source of dialectal differentiation, it will be hard to account for the differences between Icelandic and Norwegian, for Iceland was very sparsely inhabited when the ‘land-taking’ took place, and still harder to account for the very great divergences that we witness between the dialects spoken in the Faroe Islands. ”

“ The stationary existence of the Norse language in Icelandic, in which it has been preserved almost intact to the present day, is explained by the secluded position of the island, and the zeal with which the old songs and sagas, as collected and fixed in the two Eddas, have been cultivated by the inhabitants. ”

“ Icelandic is a daughter of the old Norse proper, the dialect spoken as late as the 11th century in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the adjacent islands, and a sister of the old Norse dialect which is the parent of modern Swedish and Danish. ”

“ The Icelanders of the present day retain the Old Norse language, while on the Continent it has been modified into Swedish and Norwegian-Danish. They are a well-educated people, and, in proportion to their numbers, publish many books. [Back to Main Text]
Footnote 177: A full collection of these chronicles is given in Rafn's Antiquitates Americanæ, Copenhagen, 1837, in the original Icelandic, with Danish and Latin translations. ”

“ The Icelanders were famous travellers, and the names of Icelandic students are found not only in the chief cities of Europe, but in the holy places of the East. At the beginning of the twelfth century Iceland counted 50,000 inhabitants. ”

“ What has helped Icelandic to retain its early conditions is, more than anything else, its relative isolation and the consequent minimum contact with other languages, on the one side, and the fact of its unbroken use in literature on the other. The production of literature in Iceland, although it dwindles in value and amount after the classical period until it is awakened to new life by the Reformation, has never wholly ceased since its very beginning. ”

“ Although there is practically as little doubt about the antiquity of Icelandic literature [161] as about its interest, there is unusual room for guesswork as to the exact dates of the documents which compose it. Writing seems to have been introduced into Iceland late; and it is not the opinion of scholars who combine learning with patriotism that many, if any, of the actual MSS. date further back than the thirteenth century; while the actual composition of the oldest that we have is not put earlier than the twelfth, and rather its later than its earlier part. ”

“ Many Icelanders speak English, and they are often surprisingly well-informed, both concerning their own history and the affairs of foreign lands. Still read are the sagas in the land of their birth, and they were Englished largely by Icelandic minds. There are very good secondary schools in the towns, and a College at Reykjavik itself. Though no elementary schools exist, almost every one can read and write from the excellent teaching in the homes. ”

“ But he, the grandson of the founder of the house, wrote at any rate a large part of the history; there is no doubt of that, so that for this time there exists not only a contemporary chronicle, but the memoirs of one who was most intimately concerned, himself one of the persons in the drama.
And his work is the completion of Icelandic prose. It is hardly a metaphor to say that it is the mind of Iceland, expressing itself in the best way at the end of the old Icelandic life. ”

“ Icelandic scholars, his masters in knowledge, and which he has reared and fostered so many years under an English roof, go forth and fight the battle of life for itself, and win fresh fame for those who gave it birth. It will be reward enough for him who has first clothed it in an English dress if his foster-child adds another leaf to that evergreen wreath of glory which crowns the brows of Iceland's ancient worthies. ”

“ The only difference between them is that, while the fundamental characteristics of shrewdness, plain straightforwardness, and a certain stern way of looking at life are common to both, the Icelandic school adds a complexity of structure and ornament, an elaborate mythological and enigmatical phraseology, and a regularity of rhyme, assonance, luxuriance, quantity, and syllabification, which it caught up from the Latin and Celtic poets, and adapted with exquisite ingenuity to its own main object, that of securing the greatest possible beauty of sound. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One at least of the Icelandic Sagas is one of the great prose works of the world—the story of Njal and his sons.
The most perfect heroic literature of the Northern nations is to be found in the country where the heroic polity and society had most room and leisure; and in Iceland the heroic ideals of life had conditions more favourable than are to be discovered anywhere else in history. Iceland was a world divided from the rest, outside the orbit of all the states of Europe ”

“ To adopt in every instance the ancient Icelandic form would scarcely be practicable, because the names in their modernized forms are usually familiar and easy to pronounce, while, in their Icelandic disguises, they are to English readers nearly unpronounceable, and present a needlessly forbidding appearance. ”

“ He was well read in German literature, Heine and Schiller being his favourites, and the study of the German masters and the old classical writers of Iceland opened his eyes to the corrupt state of Icelandic poetry and showed him the way to make it better. ”

“ The absence of dialects in Iceland results from the essential unity of life in that island, and the lack of any of the conditions which during the Middle Ages produced dialects in England, Germany, and France, such as town-life with its guilds and varied interests, the great corporations, ecclesiastical, legal, and medical, which by their necessary use of Latin cut off the most highly educated classes from exercising any influence on the vernacular, and the caste influences of chivalry, &c., which sometimes, as in England, allowed the upper classes to use a separate foreign language. ”

“ Other countries, though their languages were not conquering their conqueror as English was doing with French, also displayed sufficient individuality in dealing with the models and the materials with which French activity supplied them. The best poetical work of Icelandic, like the best work of its cousin Anglo-Saxon, was indeed over before the period began, and the best prose work was done before it ended, the rapid and never fully explained exhaustion of Norse energy and enterprise preventing the literature which had been produced from having effect on other nations. ”

“ The century before the Reformation was one of sadness, poverty and misery for Iceland. In 1360 Denmark took possession of Norway and Iceland. In 1420 the Black Death visited the little nation and took for toll two thirds of its population. In the fourteenth century the Reformation which was sweeping Europe reached Iceland, the gospel was given to the people and in 1584 the first complete Bible was produced in Icelandic by Bishop Guthbrandr Thorlaksson. With the reformation, also came a revival of letters. In 1602 Denmark gave to a Copenhagen company a monopoly of all Icelandic trade. ”

“ The reasons why Icelandic literature, in its most peculiar and interesting form of the saga, did not penetrate abroad are clear enough; and the remoteness and want of school-education in the island itself are by no means the most powerful of them. The very thing which is most characteristic of them, and which in these later times constitutes their greatest charm, must have been against them in their own time. ”

“ Icelanders. Inhabitants of Iceland, originally Norwegians, who settled there about the end of the ninth century. A typical tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavian race. The Icelandic Sagas form the chief part of ancient Scandinavian literature.
Idumæans or Edomites. A warlike Semitic race of Canaanite stock, thought to be descended from Esau, who were conquered by the Israelites under Saul and David, and again by Judas Maccabæus in 165 B.C., after which they disappear from history. ”

“ Two of the most notable peculiarities of the Icelandic workmanship are thus brought together,—the habit of presenting actions and events as they happen, from the point of view of an immediate witness; and the habit of correcting the heroic ideal by the ironical suggestion of the other side. Nothing is so deeply and essentially part of the nature of the Icelandic story, as its inability to give a limited or abstract rendering of life. ”

“ The strength and distinction of Icelandic poetry rest rather on the fact that it is original and national and, like that of Greece, owes little to foreign sources; and that it began in the heathen age, before Christian or Romantic influences had touched Iceland. Valuable as the early Christian poetry of England is, we look in vain there for the humour, the large-minded simplicity of motive, the suggestive character-drawing, the swift dramatic action, which are as conspicuous in many poems in the Edda as in many of the Sagas. ”

“ Jón Trausti and Einar H. Kvaran—who between them form an interesting contrast—were the most prolific novelists at the beginning of the present century. By that time prose was becoming an increasingly important part of Icelandic literature. It would be more or less true to say that in the first thirty years of the century it had gained an equal footing with poetry. For the last thirty years, however, prose has taken first place, after poetry had constituted the backbone of Icelandic literature for six hundred years, or since the end of saga-writing. ”

“ The Icelandic sagas proper, that is to say, the narratives which have the description of Icelandic affairs for their object, extend from the time of the first settlement of the island to about the year 1030, a period which, on account of struggles arising from the further colonization of Iceland and from the introduction and establishment of the new faith, necessarily awakened the greatest interest and furnished the richest materials for tradition. ”