Book Description

Excerpt from Corpus Poeticum Boreale the Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue, Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century Edited Classified and With Introduction, Excursus, and Notes It has been long taken for granted that Iceland is and has been a land of antiquaries, a place where the old traditions, nay more, the old poems and myths of the Teutons have lingered on unbroken; and glowing phrases have painted its people as a Don Quixote of nations ever dreaming over the glorious reminiscences of the gods and heroes. It is to the credit of the Icelanders as a living people that it is not so. Yet such, if he had formulated his creed, would have been the Editor's belief before he began to look for himself, some twenty years ago, into the state of literature and literary tradition in the middle ages and the post-reformation days of Iceland. In the Arna-Magnaean Collection, a vast congeries of all kinds of documents bearing on the subject, memoranda, letters, vellums, fragments of vellums, and paper-copies of vellums, there exists ample material for getting at some notion of the true state of the case. It was while working at this collection, making careful statistics of these vellums and the vellum fragments representing lost vellums, that the opinions now set forth forced themselves bit by bit upon the Editor. The following results came out from a minute enquiry into the state of the MS. of the classical literature - the Sagas touching Iceland, the Kings' Lives, the Older Bishops' Lives, etc. After the fall of the Commonwealth, in 1281, throughout the next ensuing century, there was a great activity for collecting and copying the historical literature of the past. By far the greater portion of the Sagas have gone down in fourteenth-century MSS., some of which are in fact great collections of Sagas. This contained the great collections such as Sturlunga A and B, Hulda, AM. 61, Flatey-book, Waterhorn-book, Berg's-book, which all belong to this epoch, as do also Cod. Wormianus, the Stiorn vellums, Hawk's-book. It was in fact an age in which a marked amount of curiosity was taken by the survivors of the old families as to the history of the past. The great vellums speak, though no other records arc left, for this was an unproductive though appreciative age. But that the public taste was far otherwise set during the next hundred years is proved by the rapid fall in the number of copies of classic works. Thus, as regards the number of vellums, the fifteenth century stands to the fourteenth in a ratio of 1 to 3 or even 4. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."