"Icelandic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 and ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... 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
... 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 ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... 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 these ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... some way into Thorgills of Treadholt (WARD, LOCK), thinking what an unusually plausible and imaginative yarn it was, when I turned back for possible enlightenment, and found a note to the effect that it was a transcription of an Icelandic saga. Those old fellows knew their business. I am not sagacious enough to guess where Mr. MAURICE HEWLETT has passed beyond transcription to creation, but I can tell you that he offers his readers a very charming and finished piece ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... 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 diameter, springing at intervals to the height of fifty or even ninety feet. In these hot springs, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... inhabitants, the hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic 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
... 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 dragon's ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... "to build" (O.E. byldan) is apparently connected with O.E. bold, a dwelling, of Scandinavian origin; cf. Danish bol, a farm, Icelandic bol, farm, abode. Skeat traces it eventually to Sanskrit bhu, to be, build meaning "to construct a place in which to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... steaming tea, which the Norwegians like almost as much as the English; at another sate Mrs. Astrid with Harald and Alette, occupied with the newly-published beautiful work, "Snorre Sturleson's Sagas of the Norwegian Kings, translated from the Icelandic of J. Aal." The fourth number of this work lay before Harald, open at the section "The Discovery of Vineland." He had just read aloud Mr. Aal's interesting introduction to the Sagas of Erik Roede and Karlefne, and now proceeded to read these two Sagas themselves, which contained ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... 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 ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... of 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... in 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 Language, 8vo, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... 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 oblivion. More than seven ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... stair emerged from their holes. Scrymgeour, in a dressing-gown, pushes open the door of the boudoir on the first floor, and climbs lazily. The sentimental face and the clay with a crack in it are Marriot's. Gilray, who has been rehearsing his part in the new original comedy from the Icelandic, ceases muttering and feels his way along his dark lobby. Jimmy pins a notice on his door, "Called away on business," and crosses to me. Soon we are all in the old room again, Jimmy on the hearth-rug, Marriot in the cane chair; the curtains are pinned together with a pen-nib, and the five ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... Younger Edda, is generally ascribed to the celebrated Snorre Sturleson, who was born of a distinguished Icelandic family, in the year 1178, and after leading a turbulent and ambitious life, and being twice the supreme magistrate of the Republic, was killed A.D. 1241,[4] by three of his sons-in-law and a stepson. When Snorre was three years old, John ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... hand, using 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
... people slowly retiring before the aggressions of their Indian foes. It is no longer doubted but that Norsemen, as early as the year 1000, made voyages of discovery along the coast of North America, as far south as Rhode Island: they called the country Vineland. It is true that the Icelandic accounts of these expeditions contain some foolish and improbable statements; but so do the writings of Cotton Mather, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... me, that I have not yet described my hero. I will do it now, as he stands looking down on the glorious landscape;—but in few words. Both in person and character he resembled Harold, the Fair-Hair of Norway, who is described, in the old Icelandic Death-Song of Regner Hairy-Breeches, as "the young chief so proud of his flowing locks; he who spent his mornings among the young maidens; he who loved toconverse with the handsome widows." This was an amiable ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... religion continued to prevail in the countries from which the 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, both of lands and treasure; ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... 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 not in ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... is the Icelandic version of the Nibelungen Lied. This saga has been translated into English ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... proof not only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's Reliques appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough by publishing a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation of Icelandic poetry (1763). Not long afterwards Sir William Jones published translations of Oriental poetry. Briefly, as historical, philological, and antiquarian research extended, the man of letters was also beginning to ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... tongue, very seldom go far outside those 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
... 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 in 1852. Since then, the proofs of the discovery ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... regular armed forces; Police, Coast Guard; note - Iceland's defense is provided by the US-manned Icelandic Defense ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... relished in the Middle Ages. From him Saxo borrowed a multitude of 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 ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... 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
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... whom Tacitus thus names, because his attributes resembled those of the Roman Mercury. According to Paulus Diaconus (de Gestis Langobardorum, i. 9), this deity was Wodun, or Gwodan, called also Odin. Mallet (North. Ant. ch. v.) says, that in the Icelandic mythology he is called "the terrible and severe God, the Father of Slaughter, he who giveth victory and receiveth courage in the conflict, who nameth those that are to be slain." "The Germans drew their gods by their own character, who loved nothing so much themselves as to display their strength ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... in Welsh means a ghost or goblin. It is probably the same with the Icelandic Paki, an evil spirit. But on this etymology our correspondent can consult an article by Sir F. Palgrave, on the "Popular Mythology of the Middle Ages." in the Quarterly Review, vol. xxii.; a paper, by Mr. Thoms, on the "Folk Lore of Shakspeare," No. 6.; "Puck's several ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... philosophy than are in heaven and 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 ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... 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 the Aryan ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... 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," ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... 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 has been successful in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... doctor, "who can say whether in the tenth century this name did not suit it? More than one change of this sort has taken place on the globe, and I should astonish you much more by saying that, according to Icelandic chroniclers, two hundred villages flourished on this continent eight or nine hundred ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... History of BARLAAM and JOSAPHAT was for several centuries one of the most popular works in Christendom. It was translated into all the chief European languages, including Scandinavian and Sclavonic tongues. An Icelandic version dates from the year 1204; one in the Tagal language of the Philippines was printed at Manilla in 1712.[2] The episodes and apologues with which the story abounds have furnished materials to poets and story-tellers in various ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 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. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... doubtless awakened Ibsen in Bergen. Meanwhile, in 1853, M. B. Landstad had published the earliest of his collections of the folkeviser, or national songs, while L. M. Lindeman in the same years (1853-59) was publishing, in installments, the peasant melodies of Norway. Moreover, Ibsen, who read no Icelandic, was studying the ancient sagas in the faithful and vigorous paraphrase of Petersen, and all combined to determine him to make an experiment in a purely national ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and offering a box of cigarettes. "You look well. Done any summits? When we get our affairs in order, I must be off somewhere myself. Northward, I think. I want a little bracing cold. I should like to see Iceland. You know the Icelandic sagas? Magnificent! There's the saga of Grettir the Strong—by Jove! But come, this isn't business. I have news for you, real, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... shall state very frankly the qualifications which I think I may advance in regard to this volume. I believe I have read most of the French and English literature proper of the period that is in print, and much, if not most, of the German. I know somewhat less of Icelandic and Provencal; less still of Spanish and Italian as regards this period, but something also of them: Welsh and Irish I know only in translations. Now it so happens that—for the period—French is, more than at any other time, the capital literature of Europe. Very much of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... and Germany. Each of the five Scandinavian lands has won something. Norwegian women come with full suffrage rights; Finnish delegates come as representatives of the only nation which has elected women to seats in its Parliament; Sweden and Iceland have gained a step in eligibility and our Icelandic delegate of two years ago is now a member of the city council of Reykjavik, the capital. The women of Denmark, next to those of Norway, have made the largest gain, as Municipal suffrage with liberal qualifications has been ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... witness, even though in our hearing have such things been told. It beseemeth us better that something may be added hereafter than that much should need to be taken herefrom. About King Harald are many tales set forth in lays which the Icelandic men made to him or to his sons, & for this reason was he a firm friend to them. A firm friend also was he to all our countrymen, and once when there was a great famine in Iceland permitted King Harald four of his ships to carry meal to that island, and decreed that six bushels thereof ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... are some of the equivalents of the term man in different languages. In the Saxon, mankind, a 525:9 woman, any one; in the Welsh, that which rises up, - the primary sense being image, form; in the Hebrew, image, similitude; in the Icelandic, mind. 525:12 The following translation is from ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the sea, and they 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 ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... facts, believing that elderly people really like them better than feelings. She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great many things—about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose, and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins; and—one other thing—oh yes, she thought it ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... vegetation is invigorated 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 be ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... that didn't mean anything, read from either Direction, and then he sized up his Flock with a Dreamy Eye and said: "We cannot more adequately voice the Poetry and Mysticism of our Text than in those familiar Lines of the great Icelandic Poet, Ikon Navrojk: ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... 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, to Lalage's composition. There was ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... be no doubt that Greenland, in some measure an appendage of America, was discovered in 982, by the Norwegians or their Icelandic colony; and that the same people accidentally fell in with Newfoundland, or a part of Labradore, in 1003; of which early real discoveries particular notices have been taken in the first part of this work. But these were entirely accidental, and were lost to the world ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... Latin writers of merit. Anders 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... and widely-diffused language was the Icelandic, Norman, or Doensk tunga,—that in which were written the Eddas and Skalda, the {106} Njala and Heimskringla. In it we have the suffix by, under the forms of the verbs ek by, ek bio, or at bua, and ek byggi or byggia, manere, habitare, incolere, struere, edificare; ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... likely to have been a spontaneous growth arising from a 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 of similar inflectional endings, and perhaps because it was not entirely consistent with the ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... source of wonder. The word is of Icelandic derivation, and signifies gushing. As applied to phenomena such as we are now describing, its applicability is good, for, from the mouth of the geysers, there rushes from time to time an immense mass of boiling ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... world's oldest 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, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the popular Icelandic saga of "Howard the Halt" tradition has recorded with minute detail of approbation the story of a man and woman, old, weak, friendless, who, in spite of terrible odds, succeeded in obtaining a late but sufficing vengeance for the cruel ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... of the rude fragments of poetry preserved in early Icelandic literature will now be disputed by none, but there has been until recent times an extraordinary indifference to the wealth of religious tradition and mythical lore which ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... of the French metrical version is Turoldus; but the poem, numbering originally four thousand lines, has gradually been lengthened, until now it includes more than forty thousand. There are early French, Latin, German, Italian, English, and Icelandic versions of the adventures of Roland, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were turned into prose, and formed the basis of the "Romans de Chevalerie," which were popular for so many years. Numerous variations can, of course, be noted in these tales, which have been worked over again by ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... title of Jarl, becomes ruler of Norway. This foul treachery done on the brave and honest Harald Greyfell is by some dated about A.D. 969, by Munch, 965, by others, computing out of Snorro only, A.D. 975. For there is always an uncertainty in these Icelandic dates (say rather, rare and rude attempts at dating, without even an "A.D." or other fixed "year one" to go upon in Iceland), though seldom, I think, so large a ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... dialectal Scandinavian, see the List of English Words, as compared with Icelandic, in my Appendix to Cleasby and Vigfusson's Icelandic Dictionary. In this long list, filling 80 columns, the dialectal words are marked with a dagger {*}. But the list of these is by no means exhaustive, and it will require a careful search through the pages of the English Dialect Dictionary ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... the tenth century this land did not justify its name?" added the doctor. "More than one revolution of this kind has been produced upon our globe, and I daresay I should astonish you if I were to tell you that according to Icelandic chronicles two thousand villages flourished upon this continent about eight or ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... which had been Destroyed," is in the Raczynski Collection, Berlin; "Polish Peasants Returning to the Ruins of a Burnt House," in the Lansdowne Collection, London; "A Wounded Soldier Nursed by His Betrothed," in the Gallery at Copenhagen, where is also her portrait of her husband; "An Icelandic Maiden," in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Her picture, "Reading the Bible," was painted for Napoleon III. at his request. Mme. Jerichau painted a portrait of the present Queen of England, in her wedding dress. A large number of her works are in private ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... 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 beautiful ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... in various ways by different tribes of the Icelandic and Alaskan Indians, each with its own variations, but all with one thread of similarity woven through the tales—was partly interpreted and grouped by the author into the legend that appears in this book. It is said to date ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... 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 ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... who figure in so many legends, are mere varieties of the mer-maiden, and, according to the Icelandic superstition, they and all fairies were children of Eve, whom she hid away on one occasion when the Lord came to visit her, because they were not washed and presentable! They were, therefore, condemned to ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... for such a high 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 ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... its way to Greenland, another Norwegian colony, which was converted mainly by the instrumentality of an Icelandic missionary, in the first half of the eleventh century; but this ancient Church died out in the fifteenth century. About the same time Christianity spread through the Norwegians to the Orkney, Shetland, ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... of landing on the southern coast of New England in the vicinity mentioned. That the Norsemen made a settlement in this country, though only of brief duration, is a fact in support of which many learned treatises have been written, dealing, among other things, with what are supposed to be Icelandic inscriptions discovered in that section of the country, and the like, a consideration of which, however, would be beyond ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... 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 ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... 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
... move forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden. (From zed, z, and jag, an Icelandic word of unknown meaning.) ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... traditional 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, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... 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 Christiania Firth. The name also applies to the land round the Bay, which thus formed a district, ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... to become a schoolmaster. There he studied Latin, French, Swedish; and, after three years, was appointed teacher at a girls' school. Though he had to give forty-three lessons a week, he found time to continue his own reading, and he acquired a knowledge of English, Dutch, Icelandic, and Italian. At last, however, his health gave way, and in 1847 he was obliged to resign his place. During his illness his poetical talent, which he himself had never trusted, became a source of comfort to himself and to his friends, and the warm reception which ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... exile there in study. Irish teachers were at 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, of an Irish ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... seven Icelandic short stories which appear here, the first was probably written early in the thirteenth century, while the rest all date from the early twentieth century. It might therefore be supposed that the earliest ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... pious, mild eyes that conjured the spirit out of the dead letters. Here is the celebrated Codex Argentius, the translation of the "Four Evangelists."[Q] Gold and silver letters glisten from the red parchment leaves. We see ancient Icelandic manuscripts, from de la Gardie's refined French saloon, and Thauberg's Japanese manuscripts. By merely looking at these books, their bindings and names, one at last becomes, as it were, quite worm-eaten in spirit, and longs to be out in the free air—and we ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... (derived 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... doubt that 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
... 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. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... was teaching us, and the amount of strength and comfort imparted to us by such a manifestation of perfect contentment, gratitude and trust can never be computed in words. 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. So when with each returning day we saw our children safe and ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... is the Gothic, preserved for us in the translation of the scriptures by the Gothic Bishop Ulfilas (about 375 A.D.). Other languages belonging to this group are the Old Norse, once spoken in Scandinavia, and from which are descended the modern Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish; German; Dutch; Anglo-Saxon, from which is descended ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... The really great Wagner operas are his later works, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg, and, above all, that gigantic tetralogy (a complete musico-dramatic rendering of the Icelandic Saga put into English verse under the title of Sigurd the Volsung by William Morris) which consists of four stupendous operas, Das Rheingold, Die Walkuere, Siegfried, and Gotterdaemmerung. These marvellous works, the consummation of the Bayreuth master's principles, undoubtedly stand ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Rabbit, can I forget him? Indeed, it is this 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 us was, and the commoner now in the inland parts still ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell |
