Old Icelandic

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Icelandic poetry is characterized by this quality. One has but to compare the account of the end of the world as it is found in the last strophes of Völuspá, or in the Prose Edda, with the similar account in Revelations to see how much two languages may differ in this respect. It would seem as if the short verses characteristic of Icelandic poetry forbade lengthy descriptions. The effect must be produced by a number of quick strokes: there is never time to go over a line once made. A simile is never elaborated, a new one is made when the poet wishes to insist on the figure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is, after Anglo-Saxon, no language, no literature, no mythology so full of interest for the elucidation of the earliest history of the race which now inhabits these British isles as the Icelandic. Nay, in one respect Icelandic beats every other dialect of the great Teutonic family of speech, not excepting Anglo-Saxon and Old High German and Gothic. It is in Icelandic alone that we find complete remains of genuine Teutonic heathendom. Gothic as a language, is more ancient than Icelandic; but the only literary work which we we possess in Gothic is a translation of the Bible. ”

“ The whole literature preserved is written in the Latin alphabet. The earliest manuscripts are not much later than the oldest Old Icelandic ones, and of the greatest interest. On the whole, however, the earliest Norwegian literature is in quality as well as in quantity incomparably inferior to the Icelandic. ”

“ The inscriptions of the following centuries are of far less philological interest, because after the 13th century there exists another and more fruitful source for Old Swedish, viz. a literature in the proper sense of the word. Of runic literature nothing has been preserved to our days. The literature in the Latin letters is both in quality and extent incomparably inferior to Old Icelandic, though it, at least in quantity, considerably surpasses Old Norwegian. In age, however, it is inferior to both of them, beginning only in the 13th century. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Everybody knows that alliteration was a principle of Icelandic verse. It strikes the ear that hears Icelandic poetry for the first time—or the eye that sees it, since most of us read it silently—as unpleasantly insistent, but on fuller acquaintance, we lose this sense of obtrusiveness. Morris, in this poem, uses alliteration, but so skilfully that only the reader that seeks it discovers it. A less superb artist would have made it stick out in every line, so that the device would be a hindrance to the story-telling. ”

“ A glance at the other poems in Gerald Massey's volumes shows that like Morris, and like Kingsley, and like Carlyle, the poet was a workman eager to do for the workman. Is it not suggestive that these men found themselves drawn to Old Norse character and life? The Icelandic republic cherished character as the highest quality of citizenship, and put few or no social obstacles in the way of its achievement. The literature inspired by that life reveals a fellowship among the members of that republic that is the envy of social reformers of the present day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ After giving an account of the ancient collections of poems known as the Elder and Younger Edda, the author goes on to trace the development of the Skaldic poetry, and follows this with an account of the Sagas. As the present language of Iceland has varied less from the original tongue than either the Swedish or the Dano-Norwegian, an account of the modern Icelandic literature naturally follows the chapter on the Old Norse. In the second division of the book, the literatures of Denmark and Norway are taken up together ”

“ To what extent the language of Greenland differed from that of Iceland we cannot judge from the few runic monuments which have come down to us from that colony.
Apart from the comparatively inconsiderable attempts at a grammatical treatment of Old Icelandic in the middle ages which we have Grammatical treatment. mentioned above, grammar as a science can only be said to have begun in the 17th century. ”

“ But we are not concerned with these critical considerations here; and so it will be enough to record the fact that with the publication of Percy's Northern Antiquities—the English name of Mallet's work—in 1770, knowledge of Icelandic literature passed from the exclusive control of learned antiquarians. More and more, as time went on, men went to the Icelandic originals, and translations of poems and sagas came from the press in increasing numbers. In the course of time came original works that were inspired by Old Norse stories and Old Norse conceptions. ”

“ Poetry of the commonwealth. When one turns to the early poetry of the Scandinavian continent, preserved in the rune-staves on the memorial stones of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, in the didactic Havamal, the Great Wolsung Lay (i.e., Sigurd II., Fafnis's Lay, Sigrdrifa's Lay) , and Hamdismal, all continental, and all entirely consonant to the remains of our own Old English poetry in metre, feeling, and treatment, one can see that it is with this school that the Icelandic “makers” are in sympathy, and that from it their verse naturally descends. ”

“ The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock. But see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.
[120] Lord Strangford’s note on this is:—‘The Irish monks whose bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the first Norseman had set foot on the island. The form of the old Norse poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old times ”

“ One can well understand, who handles the ponderous Thesaurus, why the first English lovers of Old Norse were antiquarians. "The Awakening of Angantyr" is literally buried in this work, and only the student of Anglo-Saxon prosody would come upon it unassisted, since it is an illustration in a chapter of the Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ et Moeso-Gothicæ. Students will remember in this connection that it was a work on poetics that saved for us the original Icelandic Edda. The Icelandic skald had to know his nation's mythology. ”

“ A name for the pre-Roman dialects of Spain, and sometimes used as a synonym for Basque, which is supposed to have been derived from it. See Celt-Iberian.
Ibo or Eboe.
African: dialect of the W. coast, at the delta of the Niger.
Icelandic.
Old Icelandic is the same as Old Norse, and the modern dialect differs from it but slightly. A language of Teutonic origin, belonging to the Scandinavian branch, planted in Iceland by Norwegian settlers, circa A.D. 874. Rask’s Grammar, translated by Dasent, London, 1843; Möbius: “Altnordisches Glossar,” Leipsig, 1866; Egilsson: “Dicty. ”

“ It should not be hard for the general reader to understand that the influence which is the theme of this dissertation is real and explicable. If he will but call the roll of his favorite heroes, he will find Sigurd there. In his gallery of wondrous women, he certainly cherishes Brynhild. These poetic creations belong to the English-speaking race, because they belong to the world. And if one will but recall the close kinship of the Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon languages, he will not find it strange that the spirit of the old Norse sagas lives again in our English song and story. ”

“ This interests us here because it displays an appreciation, if not a deep knowledge, of Icelandic literature. In it the lecturer commended to Longfellow's attention a ballad sung in the Faroes, begging him to translate it some day, "as none but he can translate it." "It is so sad, that no tenderness less exquisite than his can prevent its being painful ”

“ Although dialectical differences are not altogether wanting, they do not occur to any great extent in the Old Icelandic literary Dialects. language. Thus, in some manuscripts we find ft replaced by fst (oft, ofst, often) ; in manuscripts from the western part of the island there appears in the 13th and 14th centuries a tendency to change lf, rf into lb, rb (tolf, tolb, twelve; þǫrf, þǫrb, want) , &c. ”

“ Kleid, neuter, ‘dress,’ from the equivalent Middle High German kleit (genitive kleides) , neuter; wanting in Old High German till the middle of the 12th century; hence the word is supposed to be borrowed from Dutch kleed. Unknown originally to Old Saxon also, as well as to Gothic and several Anglo-Saxon records (Anglo-Saxon clâþ, neuter, ‘cloth, dress,’ English cloth; Old Icelandic klœ́þi, masculine, ‘stuff, cloth, dress’) . ”

“ The literary Norwegian is Danish rather than Swedish. Meanwhile, the old language, the mother-tongue, is the common property of all, and so is the old literature with its Edda and Sagas; though ... the Norwegians are the chief heroes of it. The language in which it is embodied is preserved with but little alteration in Iceland; so that it may fairly be called Icelandic, though the Norwegians denominate it Old Norse. ... See NORMANS—NORTHMEN. A. D. 960-1100. The histories of the three countries are alike in their general character though different in detail. ”

“ Geisel (1.) , masculine and feminine, ‘hostage,’ from Middle High German gisel, Old High German gisal, masculine, neuter, ‘prisoner of war, person held in security’; corresponding to Anglo-Saxon gîsel, Old Icelandic gîsl, masculine. To connect it with Geisel (2.) , feminine, as if ‘hostage’ were literally ‘one who is scourged,’ is impossible. ”

“ That original state was certainly one of original sin, if these poems are to be believed. Every page in this volume is drenched with blood, and from this book, as from Gray's poems and the other Old Norse imitations of the time, a picture of fierceness and fearfulness was the only one possible. Percy intimates in his preface that Icelandic poetry has other tales to tell besides the "Incantation of Hervor," the "Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrog," the "Ransome of Egill the Scald," and the "Funeral Song of Hacon," which are here set down ”

“ One more peculiar characteristic of Icelandic is admirably exhibited in this poem. We have seen that Warton recognized in the "Runic poets" a warmth of fancy which expressed itself in "circumlocution and comparisons, not as a matter of necessity, but of choice and skill." Certainly Morris in using these circumlocutions in Sigurd the Volsung, has exercised remarkable skill in weaving them into his story. Like the alliterations, they are part of an harmonious design. Examples abound, like ”

“ Dicuil’s reference to Iceland is interesting from another point of view. In almost all our books of popular instruction, and even in many standard works on geography, it is stated that the Danes, or Norwegians, “discovered” Iceland about the year A.D. 860, and shortly afterward colonized it during the reign of Harold Harfager. But Dicuil clearly shows that it was well known to Irish monks at least more than half a century before Dane or Norwegian ever set foot on the island, as is now generally admitted by scholars who are familiar with Icelandic literature and history. ”

“ 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. ”