"Icelandic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... joke. He would also find that my master drank tea and beer together. Now it happens that about tea I have read nothing either in the sagas or in the bardic cnylynions, but, whilst the landlord had departed to prepare my meal, I recited to the company those Icelandic stanzas which praise the beer of Gunnar, the long-haired son of Harold the Bear. Then, lest the language should be unknown to some of them, I recited my own translation, ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an Icelandic play taken out of the noblest of the Sagas," wrote Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie in his review of the published drama in 1909. "[It] is a fight, one of the greatest fights in legend.... The subject is stirring, and Mr. Bottomley takes it into a ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... earth! When great scholars make such statements as this it is scarcely surprising that ordinary people should care little for the origins of their own language. The parents of modern English are not Greek but Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian or Icelandic. Both these languages have a literature of the very highest rank, but are little studied in this country. The eighth-century English lyrics are amongst the finest in the language. As for Scandinavian, not every one in England is aware that the Icelanders are, and have ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... George Dasent's preface has been shortened, and his introduction, which everyone who is interested in old Icelandic life and history should make a point of reading in the original edition, has been considerably abridged. The three appendices, treating of the Vikings, Queen Gunnhillda, and money and currency in the tenth century, have been also exised, and with them the index. There remains the Saga itself ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... who knows nothing of philology venture to inquire whether the very close agreement of this tweet with our sweet (compare also the Anglo-Saxon swete, the Icelandic soetr, and the Sanskrit svad) does not point to a common origin of ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... and both fell in love with GREEBA, who flirted outrageously with both. These coincidences are absolutely essential in a tale of simple human passions. But, to be short, GREEBA married MICHAEL, who had become First President of the second Icelandic Republic. Thus GREEBA and MICHAEL were at Reykjavik. FASON followed, spurred by a blind feeling of revenge. About this time Mrs. FATSISTER took ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... consists of a collection much larger than I expected to see; and it is well arranged. Of the value of the Icelandic manuscripts I could not form a judgment, though the alphabet of some of them amused me, by showing what immense labour men will submit to, in order to transmit their ideas to posterity. I have sometimes thought it a great misfortune for individuals to acquire a certain ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... (nominative genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, instrumental) had been already reduced to four (nominative genitive, dative, accusative). We know this from a careful comparison of and reconstruction based on the oldest Germanic dialects of which we still have records (Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Anglo-Saxon). In the group of West Germanic dialects, for the study of which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our oldest and most valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but the phonetic form of the case syllables is already greatly reduced ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... Thor was in the form of the cross; see in Herbert's Select Icelandic Poetry, p. 11., and Laing's Kings of Norway, vol. i. pp. 224. 330., a curious anecdote of King Hacon, who, having been converted to Christianity, made the sign of the cross when he drank, but persuaded his irritated Pagan followers that it was ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... respecting which Thorpe remarks in his translation (i. p. 36 note): "Odin is the 'High One.' The poem is a collection of rules and maxims, and stories of himself, some of them not very consistent with our ideas of a supreme deity." The style of the Icelandic poem, and the manners of the period when it was composed, are of course as wide apart from those of Haykar as is Iceland from Syria, but human ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... of all household fabrics, and has affected the taste in household art in both England and America. Nevertheless he is best known as a poet. His finest poems are "The Earthly Paradise," a series of Norse legends, "Three Northern Stones," translated from Icelandic poems, and his translations of "The ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... translates the word: others, the Land-ravager. In Danish, the word is Land-ode, in Icelandic, Land-eydo.—Note to Thierry's "Hist. of the Conq. of England," book iii. vol. vi. ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Anglo-Saxon invasion. Parts of the material, such as the dragon-fights, are purely mythical. They relate to Beowa, a superman, of whom many legends were told by Scandinavian minstrels. The Grendel legend, for example, appears in the Icelandic saga of Gretti, who slays the dragon Glam. Other parts of Beowulf are old battle songs; and still others, relating to King Hygelac and his nephew, have some historical foundation. So little is known about the epic that one cannot safely make any positive ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... limits otherwise than by accident or for works of reference. On the contrary, the English and American collections are cosmopolitan, like those who have formed them. At the British Museum a volume in Icelandic, Chinese, Hawaian, or any other character is welcomed nearly as much as one in the vernacular. In Germany, at all events at Berlin and Vienna, English books of importance are recognised. But at the Bibliotheque in Paris it is not so. The French collect only the classics and their ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... very frequent matters of consideration, for these expeditions were considered both lucrative and honorable." The following appears in Wheaton's History of the Northmen: "A part of Thorfinn's company remained in Vinland, and were afterward joined by two Icelandic chieftains. * * In the year 1059, it is said, an Irish or Saxon priest named Jon or John, who had spent some time in Iceland, went to preach to the colonists in Vinland, where he was murdered by the heathen." The following ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... could not enter from the sea except at high tide. It was once believed that this was Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, but this is no longer believed. Here they landed and called the place Hop, from the Icelandic word hopa, meaning an inlet from the ocean. Here they found grape-vines growing and fields of wild wheat; there were fish in the lake and wild animals in the woods. Here they landed the cattle and the provisions which they ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... In the Icelandic "family" Sagas, on the other hand, I found in abundance what I required in the shape of human garb for the moods, conceptions, and thoughts which at that time occupied me, or were, at least, more or less distinctly present in my mind. ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... the few cases where the phenomena of rate have been studied with due attention, is in the evolution of the three languages of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden out of the Icelandic. What does this tell us? The last has altered so slowly that a modern Icelander can read the oldest works of his language. In Sweden, however, the speech has altered. So it has in Denmark; whilst both these languages are unintelligible to the Icelander, and vice versa. As to their respective ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... of its installation there is no hint that the men who set up this Icelandic Commonwealth had any sense of the need, or even of the feasibility, of such a coercive government as would be involved in concerted preparation for the common defense. Subjection to personal rule, or to official rule ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... of Zschokke's admirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and I think I began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These authors I recall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelessly as they passed through my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandic poems, in the metre of "Hiawatha"; I had for a while a notion of studying Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and decided that I would learn the language later. By this time I must have begun ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The most characteristic difference between the Saxon and Icelandic (indeed between the Teutonic and Scandinavian tongues) lies in the peculiar position of the definite article in the latter. In Saxon, the article corresponding with the modern word the, is thaet, se, se['o], for the neuter, masculine, and feminine ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... back through "flip" and the old Northumbrian present participle ending "an" to the Icelandic "fleipa," which means to prattle—I found this out in a dictionary and copied it down for Lalage. Miss Pettigrew was not, I think, justified in applying the word, supposing that she used it in its strict etymological sense, ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... Danish sculptor, died suddenly on March 25, at Copenhagen. Thorvaldsen was the son of an Icelandic sailor, who incidentally earned a living by carving wooden figure-heads for ships. The boy was born at sea, in 1770, while his mother was making a voyage to Copenhagen. At the age of twenty-four, young Thorvaldsen, who had attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Copenhagen, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Europe are so many books and papers published in proportion to the population as in Iceland. On the average one hundred books are issued annually from Icelandic presses. Several excellent newspapers ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... with regard to these hyperborean countries be extremely vague and so to speak fabulous, it is not so with that which concerns the adventurous enterprises of the "Men of the North." The Sagas, as the Icelandic and Danish songs are called, are extremely precise, and the numerous data which we owe to them are daily confirmed by the archaeological discoveries made in America, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark. This is a source of valuable information ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... Lucky, the first European to visit America, if the Icelandic records are true, christened the new land Wineland. It has been supposed that this designation was given for the grapes, but recent investigations show that the fruits were probably mountain cranberries. Captain John Hawkins, who visited the Spanish settlements in Florida ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... by the genial climate of that country! Among the luxuriant flowers there met with, groves, or forests, if I may so call them, of Monks-hood are frequently seen; the plant of deep, rich blue, and as tall as in our gardens; and this at an elevation where, in Cumberland, Icelandic moss would only be found, or the stony summits ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... a respect for him that I'd never had before, anyway," rejoined Smith. "Think of the old General knowing anything at all about Icelandic sagas—and the offhand way he picked out the anachronism and smashed it in the eye. No—so far as I am concerned, he is entitled to his holiday. Long may it wave—especially as I hope to see you, if you'll let me, while if it were an ordinary business day I should probably have to devote myself ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of the SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS selected to appear in 1916 are by natives of Iceland. They belong, however, to periods of time and to modes of writing remote from each other. Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of Icelandic historians, was born in 1179. His Prose Edda, the companion-piece of the present volume, is a Christian's account of Old Norse myths and poetic conceptions thus happily preserved as they were about to pass into ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... by Lye from the Icelandic Tiorn, stagnum, palus) is rendered in our dictionaries as synonymous with Mere or Lake; but it is properly a large Pool or Reservoir in the Mountains, commonly the Feeder of some Mere in the valleys. Tarn Watling and Blellum Tarn, though on lower ground than ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... matter to her; she knows all about them, twenty times as much as I do, though I used to travel till I hated the sight of a railway or a steamer. She tells me things about Sicily, and Norway, and the Hebrides,—old Icelandic legends,—about Burnt Njal, and those people; she makes me want to see the places, actually. There are plenty of places I have not seen. She says Iceland is a flower-garden in summer. Margaret, don't laugh at what ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... and irritated me a little besides, for I felt that it was in my own vein, and that it was I who had a right to the observation. I immediately quoted an extract from an Icelandic Saga to the effect that dead bees give a stinging quality to the very metheglin of the gods. We exchanged these remarks in crossing the vestibule of the hotel: a carriage was standing there for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... as those of Innisfallen, Ulster, Boyle, etc. Publications of the Irish Archaeological Society, Danish and Icelandic Annals. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... verse. A work constructed really with great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art; altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still: this is the Younger or Prose Edda. By these and the numerous other Sagas, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see that old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... (A word common to Teutonic languages, in O. Eng. balu, cf. Icelandic bol), evil, suffering, a word obsolete except in poetry, and more common in the adjectival form "baleful." In early alliterative poetry it is especially used antithetically with "bliss." (2) (O. Eng. bael, a blazing fire, a funeral ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... Faeroboernes Historie, in Icelandic, Danish, and the Faroer Dialect, by RAFN, imp. 8vo. large paper, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... fellows, in every kind of gorgeous grotesquerie, are preparing for the Grand Introductory Pageant—followed by the "Strange People." (They don't call them Freaks any more.) Here is Johannes Joseffson, the Icelandic Gladiator, sitting on his trunk, with his bare feet gingerly placed on his slippers to keep them off the dusty floor while he puts on his wrestling tights. As he bends over with arched back, and raises one leg to insert it into the long pink stocking, one must admire the perfect muscular grace of ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... Sunesen (d. 1228) wrote a long poem in hexameters, Hexameron, describing the creation. Under the auspices of Archbishop Absalon the monks of Sor began to compile the annals of Denmark, and at the end of the 12th century Svend Aagesen, a cleric of Lund, compiled from Icelandic sources and oral tradition his Compendiosa historia regum Daniae. The great Saxo Grammaticus (q.v.) wrote his Historia Danica under ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Pellerinism, and the Aga Gautch, who had absolutely declined to speak anywhere in public, wrote to Isabella that he could not refuse anything that Mr. Wade asked. Did you know that Howland's lecture, 'What Pellerinism Means,' has been translated into twenty-two languages, and gone into a fifth edition in Icelandic? Why, that reminds me," Miss Fosdick broke off—"I've never heard what became of your queer friend—what was his name?—whom you and Bob Wade accused me of spiriting away after that very lecture. And I've never seen you since you rushed into the house the next morning, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... reached Vendilskaga, as Skagen is called in the old Norse and Icelandic writings. For miles and miles, interspersed with sand-hills and cultivated land, houses, farms, and drifting sand-banks, stretched, and stretch still, towards Gammel-Skagen, Wester and Osterby, out to the lighthouse near Grenen, a waste, a desert, where the wind drives before it the ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... invaders had come. In Frisia in the eighth century we hear of a goddess Hulda, a kind goddess, as her name implies, who sends increase to plants and is a patroness of fishing. A god called Fosete, or Forsete (Forseti in modern Icelandicchairman), identified both with Odin and with Balder, was worshipped in Heligoland; he had a sacred well there, from which water had to be drawn in silence. There are temples, often in the middle of a wood, with priestly incumbents, and rich endowments, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... towns, as in the instance of the great city of Herculaneum, may be completely buried beneath them. Over this city the mud accumulated to the depth of over 70 feet. In addition to these phenomena, molten lava often flows from the lip of the crater, occasionally in vast quantities. In the Icelandic eruption of 1783 the lava streams were so great in quantity as to fill river gorges 600 ft. deep and 200 ft. wide, and to extend over an open plain to a distance of 12 to 15 miles, forming lakes of lava 100 feet deep. The volcanoes of Hawaii often send forth streams of lava which cover ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... of Snorre Tarleson," he said, "the celebrated Icelandic author of the twelfth century—it is a true and correct account of the Norwegian princes ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... association is one of the most important in Northern Europe, and its members include many of the most distinguished savans of Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It possesses an excellent library, which contains, amongst other things of great value, about 2000 Icelandic manuscripts, very ancient, and written in the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... bed, in which Mont Blanc might be buried without showing even his topmost snowfield above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction—fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the people—of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or even of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... full of pottage in the children's sight (there are twins in this case) and taken out as a dinner for the reapers who happened to be cutting the rye and oats. In Glamorganshire the woman declares she is mixing a pasty for the reapers. An Icelandic legend makes a woman set a pot containing food to cook on the fire and fasten twigs end to end in continuation of the handle of a spoon until the topmost one appears above the chimney, when she puts the bowl in the pot. Another woman ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... emblem of the "god of rain." There has been much speculation by various authors respecting its origin, as a religious emblem, in Mexico and Central America. It has even been supposed that some of the early Icelandic Christians of the ninth century may have reached the coast of Mexico, and introduced some knowledge of the Christian religion. But the cross was a religious emblem of the greatest antiquity, both in Syria and Egypt, and baptism was a pre-Christian rite. This ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... of the dirty linen of Queen Isabella), seems to have been common in ancient times. See also Pallas's account of the wild horses of the East, who speaks of dun and brown as the prevalent colours. In the Icelandic sagas, which were committed to writing in the twelfth century, dun-coloured horses with a black spinal stripe are mentioned; see Dasent's translation volume 1 page 169.) has collected a large body of evidence showing that this tint was common in the East as far back as the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... wood fire. The room is fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that of the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all the world—language so simple that even great scholars could find no simpler, and the children ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... natural human pleasure in similar sounds. "It lies deep in our human nature and satisfies an universal need." It is an established phenomenon in Sanskrit and Persian prosody, in Arabic, in Chinese, in Celtic, in Icelandic. Greek prosody, and Latin, which was based upon Greek, rejected it, partly perhaps because it was too simple an ornament for the highly cultivated Greek taste, especially on account of the great frequency ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... celebrated Icelandic astronomer, disciple of Tycho Brahe, and coadjutor of the Bishop of Holen, died in 1649 at the great age of 95. His principal works, besides his Description and History of Iceland, (published at Amsterdam in 1643, 4to), are Idea Vera Magistratus (Copenhagen, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... belief, "the great storms directed from heaven" were caused by demons. Mankind heard them "loudly roaring above, gibbering below".[98] The south wind was raised by Shutu, a plumed storm demon resembling Hraesvelgur of the Icelandic Eddas: ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... through the winter at St. Omer, and then went off to get help from Sweyn, of Denmark, and failing that, from Harold Hardraade of Norway. But how he sped there must be read in the words of a cunninger saga-man than this chronicler, even in those of the "Icelandic Homer," Snorro Sturleson. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... Once a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... and the right manner of saying it, have shaped the true form of heroic poetry. We can see that its elementary principles, the methods of composition in verse and prose, are essentially the same in all times and countries, in the Iliad, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the old Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon poems, and to some extent in the French Chansons de Geste; they might be used to-morrow for a heroic subject by any one gifted with the requisite skill, imagination, and the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... son of a merchant of an old and well known Icelandic family, was born near Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, on June 8, 1888. He was graduated twenty-two years later from the College of Reykjavik, where he received honoris causa in literature and language, the ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... springs, whose tepid waters issue as gently as an ordinary spring, are called Langers, or baths; others that throw up boiling water with great noise, are denominated Caldrons, in Icelandic 'Hverer.' The most remarkable is the Geyser, which is found near Skalholdt, in the middle of a plain, where there are about forty springs of a smaller size. It rises from an aperture nineteen feet in ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the falsity, the instinctive duplicity which would fain regard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, at noble morality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the "gospel of the lowly," the doctrine of the need of salvation, on one's lips!{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Incidentally, I admire the modesty of Christians ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... a brother, or brothers, but a treacherous friend or a secret, cowardly rival, who attempts the life of the hero and claims the credit and reward for his bold achievement. Many examples must occur to readers familiar with Icelandic, Norwegian, and German folk-tales which need not here be cited. In the old French romance of the Chevalier Berinus and his gallant son Aigres de l'Aimant, the King of Loquiferne is in love with the Princess ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... servant, a young lad, who said to me one day, when I was in a bad temper: 'You've become a great hand at swearing in Icelandic!' Ha, ha, ha—he appreciated me: 'a great hand at ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... been successfully established by the Hudson's Bay Company on Lake Winnipeg. A tramway of five miles in length was being built by them to avoid the Grand Rapids and connect that navigation with steamers on the River Saskatchewan. On the west side of the lake, a settlement of Icelandic immigrants had been founded, and some other localities were admirably adapted for settlement. Moreover, until the construction of the Pacific Railway west of the city of Winnipeg, the lake and Saskatchewan River are destined to become the ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... imprisonment. Had I known who the offender was, I would have prayed the winds and waves to bear him to Icelandic seas, rather than have had his crime published to the world. It is, however, the retribution of heaven; and we ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the direct effect of the calamity, and by the famine due to the ravaging of the fields and the frightening of the fish from the shores which it induced, destroyed nearly one fifth of the Icelandic people. It is, in fact, to be remembered as one of the three or four most calamitous eruptions of which we have any account, and, from the point of view of lava flow, the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... superstitions can be seen. It was from the Latin versions of the Greek original that translations were made into nearly all European languages. There are extant to-day, whole or in fragments, Bestiaries in German, Old English, Old French, Provencal, Icelandic, Italian, Bohemian, and even Armenian, Ethiopic, and Syriac. These various versions differ more or less in the arrangement and number of the animals described, but all point back to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... not written by the Editor, as he has often explained, 'out of his own head.' The stories are taken from those told by grannies to grandchildren in many countries and in many languages— French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Gaelic, Icelandic, Cherokee, African, Indian, Australian, Slavonic, Eskimo, and what not. The stories are not literal, or word by word translations, but have been altered in many ways to make them suitable for children. Much has been left out in places, and the narrative has been broken up into conversations, ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... bye, Forby reasons that our Suffolk third person singular 'It go, etc.,' is probably right as being the old Icelandic form. Why should the 3rd p. sing. be the only one that varies. And in the auxiliaries May, Shall, Can, etc., there is no change for the 3rd pers. I incline to the Suffolk because of its avoiding ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... functioning legislative assembly, the Althing, established in 930. Independent for over 300 years, Iceland was subsequently ruled by Norway and Denmark. Fallout from the Askja volcano of 1875 devastated the Icelandic economy and caused widespread famine. Over the next quarter century, 20% of the island's population emigrated, mostly to Canada and the US. Limited home rule from Denmark was granted in 1874 and complete independence attained in 1944. Literacy, longevity, income, and ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... ago, few if any of them have been made accessible to the average English reader. Now the Gyldendal Publishing Company of Copenhagen has undertaken the neglected task of producing English translations of the best Scandinavian fiction, the latest of which is Guest the One-Eyed, by the Icelandic novelist, GUNNAR GUNNARSSON. It is not a particularly powerful narrative, and is marked by the characteristic inconsequence that tends to convert the Scandinavian novel into a melange of family biographies; yet the author ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... them with such fury that he slew Thorbiorn upon the spot, and killed several of his attendants, although Oddo, the son of Katla, escaped free from wounds, having been dressed by his mother in an invulnerable garment. After this action, more blood being shed than usual in an Icelandic engagement, Thorarin returned to Mahfahlida, and, being questioned by his mother concerning the events of the skirmish, he answered in the improvisatory and enigmatical poetry of his ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... the Icelandic and Scandinavian poets are here recounted in a cohesive and lucid style suitable for boys and girls, thus in an easy way introducing the famous and fantastic heroes and heroines of Norse Mythology. The beautiful colour pictures, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... "Antiquitates Americanae," gives notices of numerous Icelandic voyages to American and other lands of the West. The existence of a great country southwest of Greenland is referred to, not as a matter of speculation merely, but as something perfectly well known. ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... their Influence on the English Race.—2. The Mythology.—3. The Scandinavian Languages.—4. Icelandic, or Old Norse Literature: the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Scalds, the Sagas, the "Heimskringla." The Folks-Sagas and Ballads of the Middle Ages.—5. Danish Literature: Saxo Grammaticus and Theodoric; Arreboe, Kingo, Tycho Brahe, Holberg, Evald, Baggesen, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... number of personages who visit the park, it may be well to quote from him some of the theories he discussed and the opinions he expressed. On page 416, beginning the chapter with the derivation of the word geyser from the Icelandic word geysa—to ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... decorated them with carvings painted in gay colours, used every space for pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; the cathedrals that have remained ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... Bere barley. Cf. A.S. baerlic, Icelandic, barr, meaning barley, the grain used for making malt for ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... fire and sword freely, it is not a matter of wonder that his conquests were rapid and complete. It has been said of Harald Fairhair by his contemporaries, handed down by the scalds, and recorded in the Icelandic Sagas, that he was of remarkably handsome appearance, great and strong, and very generous ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... that explains the word rare (which has Dryden's support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would use underdone. I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had ever anything to do with the Icelandic hrar (raw), as it plainly has not in rareripe, which means earlier ripe,—President Lincoln said of a precocious boy that 'he was a rareripe.' And I do not believe it, for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... well-known scholar who spent many years in gathering materials for an Icelandic Dictionary. Mr. Cleasby died in 1847, but the work he had planned was not published until 1874, when it appeared under the editorship of Mr. Vigfusson,[A] assisted by ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... the first page of his history, pronounces the story of the discovery of our country by the Icelandic Northmen, a narrative "mythological in form and obscure in meaning"; and adds that "no clear historical evidence establishes the natural probability that they accomplished the passage." But the first volume of Bancroft was published ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... have no detailed accounts of voyages to Vineland. There are, however, references to it in Icelandic literature. There does not seem any ground to believe that the Norsemen succeeded in planting a lasting colony in Vineland. Some people have tried to claim that certain ancient ruins on the New England coast—an old stone mill at Newport, and so on—are evidences of such a settlement. But the claim ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... the word for reins, "guiders," which, until the Rommany reached England, was voidas. In this instance the resemblance in sound between the words undoubtedly conduced to an union. Gibberish may have come from the Gipsy, and at the same time owe something to gabble, jabber, and the old Norse or Icelandic gifra. Lush may owe something to Mr Lushington, something to the earlier English lush, or rosy, and something to the Gipsy and Sanskrit. It is not at all unlikely that the word codger owes, through cadger, a part of its being to kid, a basket, as Mr Halliwell suggests ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... Malte-Brun, and Mr. Forster. The latter extracts it from the Saga or Chronicle of Snorro, who was born in 1179, and wrote in 1215; so that his account was formed long after the event is said to have taken place. Forster says, "The facts which we report have been collected from a great number of Icelandic manuscripts, and transmitted to us by Torfreus in his two works entitled Veleris Groenlandiae Descriptio, Hafnia, 1706, and Historia Winlandiae Antiquae, Hafnia, 1705." Forster appears to have no doubt of the authenticity of the ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... The Icelandic mice have probably the most curious methods of travelling of all migratory animals. Dr. Henderson, an authority on Iceland, not only verifies the fact himself, but gives the names of many prominent investigators who have seen the mice crossing small rivers and streams ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... phrases, sometimes apt but often crabbed and deformed, as well as an exemplary and homiletic turn of narrative. Other idioms, and perhaps the practice of interspersing verses amid prose (though this also was a twelfth century Icelandic practice), Saxo found in a fifth-century writer, Martianus Capella, the pedantic author of the "De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii" Such models may have saved him from a base mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not worthy of him, and ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... in a dead language. You see all depends on whether I can authenticate the four periods with their three catastrophes; for a new form of language presupposes a political change. Forms such as Har-aqaiti I can explain just as that the Norwegian names of places are younger than the corresponding Icelandic forms; in the colony the old remains as a fixed form, in the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... of the Icelandic Geysers are, it has been observed, accounted for by the siphon theory; in other words, this theory supposes the existence of a chamber in the heated earth, not quite full of water, and communicating with the upper air by means of a pipe, whose lower orifice is at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic "Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites, songs, and traditions. These began to fall under the notice of scholars about ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... The philosophy of Abelard during his lifetime (1100-42) had penetrated to the ends of Italy. The French poetry of the trouveres counted within less than a century translations into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish, Dutch, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish"; and he might have added that England needed no translation, but helped to compose the poetry, not being at that time so insular as she afterwards became. "Such ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... one of the many dreams which his active imagination had conjured up as a part of his mission. He was one of the earliest of that school of reformers, of whom we have heard so much of late years, that urge the readoption of the old Norse language—or, what is nearest to it now, the Icelandic—as the vehicle of art and literature. In the attempt to dethrone Dansk from its preeminence as the language of the drama, Ole Bull signally failed, and his Norwegian theatre, established at Bergen, proved only an insatiable tax on ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden. (From zed, z, and jag, an Icelandic word of ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... respect—as suited a Toth-Ra Tum-Sennacherib Embodiment—all his trouble would have been averted. They compared him to the Ancient Mariner, but none the less they were proud of him and proud of the Englishman who had sent the manifestation. They did not call it a Sending because Icelandic magic was ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... years Morris learned Icelandic, and his next published works were translations of some of the Icelandic sagas, writings composed from six to nine hundred years ago, and containing a mass of legends, histories and romances finely told in a noble language. These translations were ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... position were not fully known. But he had really earned the honour by his ability and scholarship. It is questionable whether any man in Scotland has a more extensive acquaintance with languages, both modern and ancient. He is particularly conversant with Icelandic literature, which very few people have studied, but which is specially worthy of study, both for its historical interest and its poetry. Indeed, from the Mediterranean to Iceland there is, perhaps, no language spoken that Principal ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... from Anglo-Sax, bonda, which means simply agriculturist. The word is of Icelandic origin and related to Boor, another word which has deteriorated and is rare as a surname, though the cognate Bauer is common enough in Germany. Holder is translated by Tennant. For some other names applied to the humbler peasantry see ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... a north country word for the mouth of a river, from the Icelandic. (2) "The Bay" (comp. ch. ii., and other passages), the name given to the great bay in the east of Norway, the entrance of which from the North Sea is the Cattegat, and at the end of which is the ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... "Vendilskaga," as Skjagen is called in old Norwegian and Icelandic writings. At that time Old Skjagen, with the eastern and western town, extended for miles, with sand hills and arable land as far as the lighthouse near "Grenen." Then, as now, the houses were strewn among the wind-raised sand-hills—a wilderness in which the wind sports ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... great pleasure I perceive that the books have all arrived safe. But I find that, instead of an Icelandic Grammar, you have lent me an Essay on the origin of the Icelandic Language, which I here return. Thorlakson's Grave-ode is superlatively fine, and I translated it this morning, as I breakfasted. I have just finished a translation of Baggesen's ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... of the language, the word 'worm' had a somewhat different meaning from that in use to-day. It was an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon 'wyrm,' meaning a dragon or snake; or from the Gothic 'waurms,' a serpent; or the Icelandic 'ormur,' or the German 'wurm.' We gather that it conveyed originally an idea of size and power, not as now in the diminutive of both these meanings. Here legendary history helps us. We have the well-known legend of the 'Worm Well' of Lambton ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... intellectual life of America, stands a monument of bronze which some Scandinavian and historical enthusiasts have raised to the memory of Leif, son of Eric the Red, who, in the first year of the eleventh century, sailed from Greenland where his father, an Icelandic jarl or earl, had founded a settlement. This statue represents the sturdy, well-proportioned figure of a Norse sailor just discovering the new lands with which the Sagas or poetic chronicles of the North connect his name. At the foot of the pedestal the artist has placed the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... of the Mississippi and extending southwards to the borders of Georgia and Alabama, of which the very vigorous and independent inhabitants were and are in many ways a people apart, often cherishing to this day family feuds which are prosecuted in the true spirit of the Icelandic Sagas. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... long time holding his own; but Audun was a man of full strength, and at last prevailed. Grettir's next performance brought him into more trouble. Asmund had a bosom friend named Thorkel Krafla, who paid him a visit at Biarg on his way to the Thing, or Icelandic parliament, with a retinue of sixty followers, for Thorkel was a great chief, and a man of substance. Each traveller had to carry his own provisions for the journey, including Grettir, who joined Thorkel's company. Grettir's saddle turned over, however, ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... of the Icelandic coast, she says, were very different from the descriptions she had read in books. She had conceived of a barren desolate waste, shrubless and treeless; and she saw grassy hillocks, leafy copses, and even, as she thought, patches of ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... Columbus, gathered grapes and built houses on the southern side of Cape Cod. These facts, long considered mythical, have been established, to the satisfaction of European scholars, by the publication of Icelandic contemporaneous annals. This remarkable people have furnished nearly the whole population of England by means of the successive conquests of Saxon, Danes, and Normans, driving the Keltic races into the mountainous regions ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... occurs over and over again. That the series is often of emotional rather than of historical value is suggested by the wordplays and by the fact that the hero tales do not show what is so characteristic of Icelandic saga—a care to record the ancestry of each character as it is introduced into the story. To be sure, they commonly begin with the names of the father and mother of the hero, and their setting; but in the older mythological tales these are almost invariably Ku and Hina, a convention ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... the court of Charlemagne; Irish teachers missionarized Austria and Germany. When the Norsemen discovered Iceland, they found Irish books there; probably Irish scholars as well, for it has been noted (by Matthew Arnold) that the Icelandic sagas, unlike any other Pre-Christian Teutonic literature, bear strong traces of the Celtic quality of Style. They had their schools everywhere. You hear of an Irish bishop of Tarentum in the latter part of the seventh century; and a hundred years later, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... have not only retained an old proverb which ascribes to the same animal "ti Maends Styrke og tolo Maends Vid," ten men's strength and twelve men's cunning, but they still pay to him something of the reverence with which ancient superstition invested him. The student of Icelandic literature will find in the saga of Finnbogi hinn rami a curious illustration of this feeling, in an account of a dialogue between a Norwegian bear and an Icelandic champion—dumb show on the part of Bruin, and chivalric words on that of Finnbogi—followed ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... the name of the mythic national hero of the Germans, whose tragic fate is most powerfully described in the "Nibelungen Lied," and in a series of lays of the Icelandic Edda. A matchless warrior, a Dragon-killer and overthrower of Giants, who possesses a magic sword, he conquers the northern Nibelungs and acquires their famed gold hoard. In the great German epic he is the son of Siegmund and Siegelinde, who rule ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... INGEMUNDSON'S LAY. In the first half of the twelfth century an Icelandic skald of this name lived and sang at the court of King Eystein in Norway. He loved a young Icelandic girl, but had not declared his love. When his brother was going home to Iceland, Ivar asked him to tell her of his love and ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the first European to reach the New World. About six hundred years earlier, Vikings from Norway settled in Iceland, and from the Icelandic chronicles we learn that about 986 A.D. Eric the Red planted a colony in Greenland. His son, Leif Ericsson, about 1000 A.D., led a party south-westward to a stony country which was probably the coast of Labrador or Newfoundland. Going on southward, they came at last to a spot where wild grapes ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... bilateral agreement, Iceland's defense was provided by a US-manned Icelandic Defense Force (IDF) headquartered in Keflavik; in October 2006, all US military forces in Iceland were withdrawn; nonetheless, the US and Iceland signed a Joint Understanding to strengthen their bilateral defense relationship, including regular security consultations, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... work. Mr. Durant also began the collection of scientific and literary periodicals containing the original papers of the great investigators, now so valuable to the college. "This same idea of original work led him to purchase for the library books for the study of Icelandic and allied languages, so that the English department might also begin its work at the root of things. He wished students of Greek and Latin to illuminate their work by the light of archeology, topography, and epigraphy. Such books ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and Finnish and all but Icelandic cafes in ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... sundry dialects of the north of Europe, the preposition at has been preferred for the governing of the infinitive: "The use of at for to, as the sign of the infinitive mode, is Norse, not Saxon. It is the regular prefix in Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, and Feroic. It is also found in the northern dialects of the Old English, and in the particular dialect of Westmoreland at the present day."—Fowler, on the English ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... heroes, fierce encounters with giants and monsters were invented to glorify their strength and prowess. David, with a stone from his sling, slew Goliath. The crafty Ulysses put out the eye of Polyphemus. Grettir, according to the Icelandic saga, overcame Glam, the malevolent, death-dealing vampire who "went riding the roofs." Beowulf fearlessly descended into the turbid mere to grapple with Grendel's mother. Folktales and ballads, in which incidents similar to those in myths and heroic ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the first place called Ravenser was a Danish settlement just within the Spurn Point, the name being a compound of the raven of the Danish standard, and eyr or ore, meaning a narrow strip of land between two waters. In an early Icelandic saga the sailing of the defeated remnant of Harold Hardrada's army from Ravenser, after the defeat of the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, is mentioned in ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... cattle-fines were converted into money-fines, the sheep was rated at ten, and the ox at a hundred asses (Festus, v. -peculatus-, p. 237, comp. pp. 34, 144; Gell. xi. i; Plutarch, Poplicola, ii). By a similar adjustment the Icelandic law makes twelve rams equivalent to a cow; only in this as in other instances the Germanic law has substituted the duodecimal for ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that in two such widely different cultures as those of Iceland and China we should find the same law apparently at work; the periods are vastly unlike in actual, but not so in relative duration. We have no way of properly placing the maintenance of Icelandic and Chinese as they have been other than by simply laying down the existence of what we may call a Law of Retardation, whose ultimate causes we cannot fathom or classify, but which will stand as an opposite phase of the Law of ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... and, as he admits my conjecture to be specious, that he will, in the course of his very useful labours, ultimately find it not only specious but correct. Meanwhile, I submit to his consideration, that beside the analogy of the Gothic sprauto, we have in Icelandic spretta, imperf. spratt, "subito movere, repente salire, emicare;" and sprettr, "cursus citatus," and I do think ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various |
