Book Description

Excerpt from Denmark and Sweden: With Iceland and Finland Among all the countries ofeurope, it is with those of the Scandinavian North and with Holland that we in Britain are most nearly connected by blood, by reli gion, and by similarity of ideas and habits. Yet most of us in this country have very scant knowledge of the history of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, although the political relations of both Great Britain and Ireland were constantly affected by all-these four countries during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, and though in quite recent times our commercial and also our intellectual intercourse with them has attained a constantly increasing im portance. Accordingly, the appearance of a new Sketch of their history, brief, but perhaps all the more likely to be generally read because it is brief, deserves a welcome. The motive which specially prompts me to write these few lines of preface to the book of Mr. Jon Stefansson, is the fact that he is an Icelander, and that I have long known him as a scholar who has brought his knowledge of the lan guage and history of his own isle to illustrate the early history of the British islands by a study of our place-names, which he has shown to be, especially. 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.