Icelandic

“ We realized in those days, as never before, the full force and beauty of the Icelandic custom: living in the midst of dangers seen and unseen, these people, we are told, every morning open the outer door, and looking reverently up to Heaven, thank God they are still alive. ”

“ It is, however, becoming ever clearer, and to an increasing number, how supremely important is Icelandic as a word-hoard to the English-speaking peoples, and that in its legend, song, and story there is a very mine of noble and pleasant beauty and high manhood. That which has been done, one may hope, is but the beginning of a great new birth, that shall give back to our language and literature all that heedlessness and ignorance bid fair for awhile to destroy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Icelandic poetry is more difficult to read than Icelandic prose, and so it seems strange that the former should have been attacked first by English scholars. Yet so it was, and until 1844 our English literature had no other inspiration in old Norse writings than the rude and rugged songs that first lent their lilt to Gray. The human North is in the sagas, and when they were revealed to our people, Icelandic literature began to mean something more than Valhalla and the mead-bouts there. The scene was changed to earth, and the gods gave place to nobler actors, men and women. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It will be best to take as the type the smaller Icelandic Saga, from which indeed all the later forms of composition have sprung. This is, in its orginal form, the story of the life of an Icelandic gentleman, living some time in the tenth or eleventh centuries. It will tell first of his kin, going back to the settler from whom he sprung, then of his youth and early promise before he left his father's house to set forth on that foreign career which was the fitting education of the young Northern chief. ”

“ At that time I did not distinguish the Icelandic from the Danish but I knew the tune, America, and I mingled the good English words of Dr. Smith with the lisping gutturals of the Scandinavian. Norse and Yankee are [48] well met in this Icelandic sea and I doff my cap to the descendants of those sturdy mariners who discovered Iceland, Greenland and America before Columbus was born, who Anglicised Celt and Britain and eventually made possible our own dear New England.
The morning vapors are scattered. The ocean is a thing of life. ”

“ The effects of the Reformation was deeply felt in Icelandic literature, both prose and verse. The name of Hallgrim Petersen, whose Passion-hymns, “the flower of all Icelandic poetry,” have been the most popular composition in the language, is foremost of all writers since the Second Change of Faith. The gentle sweetness of thought, and the exquisite harmony of wording in his poems, more than justify the popular verdict. His Hymns were finished in 1660, and published in 1666, two great Protestant poets thus being contemporaries. ”

“ This and other contemporary manuscripts, including the Heimskringla of Snorre Sturleson and the great body of Icelandic sagas, either at first hand or as filtered through the leading writers on Icelandic [84] history, constitute the material out of which is made up the history of Iceland, in the days when it was sending its adventurous spirits to Greenland and probably to the American main. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ ICELANDIC LANGUAGE. With the Norwegian popular dialects and Faroese, Icelandic forms the West Norse subdivision of the Scandi- navian languages, as opposed to the East Norse, made up of Swedish and Danish. The history of Icelandic begins with the settlement of Iceland by Norwegians, principally from Western Norway, at the end of the ninth century. After this time there was gradually developed in Iceland a particular West Norwegian dialect, which, however, at the outset differed but slightly from the parent Norwegian. ”

“ I was with the mate on the bridge at five the next morning and as anxious as was Ingölfr and his foster brother, Hjörleifr, eleven centuries before, to discover what secrets these northern waters held,—when the dim outline of land was seen through the shifting fog. An enthusiastic Dane, an Icelandic maiden and her Swedish lover started the national anthem of Iceland. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Still better is Maður og kona (“Man and Wife”) , published after his death by the Icelandic Literary Society. He had a great fund of delicate humour, and his novels are so essentially Icelandic in their character, and so true in their descriptions, that he is justly considered by most of his countrymen not only as the father of the Icelandic novel, but as the best novelist Iceland has produced. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This clear self-consciousness is the distinction of Icelandic civilisation and literature. It is not vanity or conceit. It does not make the Icelandic writers anxious about their own fame or merits. It is simply clear intelligence, applied under a dry light to subjects that in themselves are primitive, such as never before or since have been represented in the same way. The life is their own life ”

“ 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. ”

“ The present territory of Icelandic, aside from small settlements in the United States and in British America, is the island of Iceland, where it is the spoken and written language of the 70,000 inhabitants. The literary language of the present time is to all intents and purposes the spoken speech, not of any particular region or of any separate class, but of the people of the whole country, with the reservation that in the capital and the trading places along the coast much Danish is in use, and the spoken language is no longer as pure as elsewhere. ”

“ There are five races of man with whom any remains which may be found in Iceland may be compared with a view to their identification—the Norwegian, Skrælling or Esquimaux, Irish, Lappish, and Russian. I shall briefly pass over the chief characters of these races, and as the Norwegian is the race which forms the majority of the Icelandic population at the present time, I shall commence with it. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ If you turn off your leader, as a certain traveller did, he will assuredly sue you in damages at Reykjavik; and for one who cannot speak Icelandic, or at least Danish, to be guideless is to be cast naked upon a desert shore. ”

“ The Icelandic Sagas—the prose histories of the fortunes of the great Icelandic houses—are the last and also the finest expression and record of the spirit and the ideas belonging properly to the Germanic race in its own right, and not derived from Rome or Christendom. Those of the German nations who stayed longest at home had by several centuries the advantage of the Goths and Franks, and had time to complete their native education before going into foreign subjects. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”