"Icelandic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... of 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, with the black and white drawings, ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... least 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 ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... Particularly, the great collections of Grundtvig ('Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser') for Denmark, and of Child ('The English and Scottish Popular Ballads') for our own tongue, show how common descent or borrowing connects the individual ballads of these groups. "Almost every Norwegian, Swedish, or Icelandic ballad," says Grundtvig, "is found in a Danish version of Scandinavian ballads; moreover, a larger number can be found in English and Scottish versions than in German or Dutch versions." Again, we find certain national preferences in the character ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... 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 ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... signed by a large majority of all the women in Iceland asked for the complete suffrage, and during the present year the Parliament voted to give this to all women over 25 years old. It must be acted upon by a second Parliament, but its passage is assured, and Icelandic women will vote on the same terms ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... great 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, won the grand prize, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Teutonic 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 ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... 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 ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song Of parting, and a sad metallic clang Send through the mists. Upon their southward way They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet Flamy volcanoes, and the seething founts Of Geysers, and the melancholy yellow Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying, Their lily wings amid the boreal lights, Journey away unto the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... 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 these ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... stretching himself, 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, substantial, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... Atlantic sea-board and the basin 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
... 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 ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... Of the 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 of these ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... 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 of him, and they must answer for some of his falsities of ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... 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 weakness; and it sometimes led him into mischief. ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... legend, given 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 back thousands of years before Abraham and our Bible. Acknowledgments ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the Eskimo 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, made ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... on the way there, although when we met he was headed in the other direction. By a devious walk of half a mile we reached the high iron fence of Kelmscott House. We arrived amid a florid description of the Icelandic Sagas as told by my new-found friend and interpreted by Th' Ole Man. My friend had not read the Sagas, but still he did not hesitate to recommend them; and so we passed through the wide-open gates and up the stone walk to the entrance ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Saga 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
... 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
... the individual. The unit of civilization is the family. Prior to December 20, 1620, New-England life had never seen a civilized family or felt its influences. It is true that the Icelandic Chronicles tell us that Lief, the son of Eric the Red, 1001, sailed with a crew of thirty-five men, in a Norwegian vessel, and driven southward in a storm, from Greenland along the coasts of Labrador, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... 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 ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... where they will keep warm, and then stretch their stout, felt-covered legs to the 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 crawling ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... 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 weaving into his chapters ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... Angus,[4] neither of them ever became Earl of Orkney. Robertson's contention in his Early Kings of Scotland, (vol. II, p. 23 note) that they were grafted on the wrong pedigree seems justified by the discrepancy in dates; for the Icelandic Annals give only one Gibbon who died in 1256, and we know that Magnus III was earl in 1263 and till 1273. Indeed little confidence can be reposed in the Diploma of the Orkney Earls, the only authority for the existence of two Orkney Earls called Gilbert, and ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"—and note farther that the word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but the Arabic 'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:—the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squaela' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely have been made an adjective by Gerarde),—"and will not yield to any culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... library 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 ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... 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 first ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight." The impression they produced was lasting. When, several years later, he wrote an "Epistle" to A. S. Cottle to be published in the latter's volume of "Icelandic Poetry," he again alluded to them. In referring to the places described ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... romance called the 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
... round the names of 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, in which incidents similar to those in myths and heroic legends occur, are often overshadowed ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... 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 International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... present volume Sir 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 story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... narrative poems, which he composed with remarkable fluency. The most important is the series of versions of Greek and Norse myths and legends which appeared in 1868-70 as 'The Earthly Paradise.' Shortly after this he became especially interested in Icelandic literature and published versions of some of its stories; notably one of the Siegfried tale, 'Sigurd the Volsung.' In the decade from 1880 to 1890 he devoted most of his energy to work for the Socialist party, of which he ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... 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 ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... intentional burnings were redressed in that way. /3/ The appeal of arson was brother to the appeal de pace et plagis. As the latter was founded on a warlike assault, the former supposed a house-firing for robbery or revenge, /4/ such as that by which Njal perished in the Icelandic Saga. But this crime seems to have had the same history as others. As soon as intent is admitted to be sufficient, the law is on the high-road to an external standard. A man who intentionally sets fire to his own house, which is so near to other houses ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... boasts the 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 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that I used to go to clubs and theatres, shaved, dressed, and dined before I knew her. The first months I travelled a great deal, straying as far as Iceland. The sight of Swedish lakes, Norwegian fiords, and Icelandic geysers conveyed to me no direct impressions; I only tried to imagine what Aniela would have felt or said to such a view,—in short, I saw with her eyes, thought her thoughts, and felt with her heart. And when presently I remembered that she was Aniela ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of a number of variants that Benfey does not mention: Dozon, "Albanian Tales," No. 4; a Persian manuscript text of the "Sindibad Nama;" a Japanese legend known as early as the tenth century; the "1001 Nights" story of "Prince Ahmed and the Peri Banu;" Powell and Magnussen's "Icelandic Legends," pp. 348-354, "The Story of the Three Princes;" Von Hahn, "Contes Populaires Grecs" (Athens and Copenhagen, 1879), No. II, p. 98. Of these he says (p. 285), "We have probably the original of all these different versions in the fifth of the 'Vetalapanchavinsati,'"—but ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... 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, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... 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 I am ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... 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 seek for new 'motives,' and to discover merits in old forms ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Faeroboernes Historie, in Icelandic, Danish, and the Faroer Dialect, by RAFN, imp. 8vo. large paper, bds., ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... her—and his Library manner had settled upon him now to the very tips of his fingers—"were pirates. The word is of Icelandic origin, from vik, the name applied to the small inlets along the coast in which they concealed their galleys. I may mention that Olaf was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian monarch to reign ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... 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
... "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. Let us remember that in vindicating the Northmen we honor those who not only ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... is no 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 ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... M. de Buat, (Hist. des Peuples Anciens, tom. ix. p. 348—396. * Note: Compare Manso, Ost Gothische Reich. Beylage, vi. Malte-Brun brings them from Scandinavia: their names, the only remains of their language, are Gothic. "They fought almost naked, like the Icelandic Berserkirs their bravery was like madness: few in number, they were mostly of royal blood. What ferocity, what unrestrained license, sullied their victories! The Goth respects the church, the priests, the senate; the Heruli mangle all in a general massacre: there is no pity for age, no refuge ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... strands, clustered in the calm blue of the upper air; soft, salmon-hued cumulus masses sailed solemnly along the eastern horizon— atmospheric ships freighted in the tropics with crystal showers for thirsty fields and parched meadows—with snow crowns for Icelandic mountain brows, and shrouds of sleet for mouldering masts, tossed high and helpless on desolate Arctic cliffs. Restless gulls flashed their spotless wings, as they circled and dipped in the shining waves; and in the magic ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... up in the Lookout and read a Text 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, ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... 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, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... confusion here between 'heal' to make 'hale' or '[w]hole' (Anglo-Saxon haelan) and the old (and Provincial) English hill, to cover, hilling, covering, hellier, a slater, akin to 'hell', the covered place, 'helm'; Icelandic hylja, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... turned back, and walked as far as Worcester, where he found work, and found something else which he liked better. There is an Antiquarian Society at Worcester, with a large and peculiar library, containing a great number of books in languages not usually studied, such as the Icelandic, the Russian, the Celtic dialects, and others. The directors of the Society placed all their treasures at his command, and he now divided his time between hard study of languages and hard labor at the forge. To show how he passed ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... 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 ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... eruptions 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... old Greek 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... political and 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 head which ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... similarity to the Finnish. Both belong to the Ugrian stock of agglutinative languages, i.e., those which preserve the root most carefully, and effect all changes of grammar by suffixes attached to the original stein. Grimin has shown that both Gothic and Icelandic present ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Freidis returned to Greenland, where she lived for some time universally detested and despised, and died in the utmost misery. The remaining colonists were dispersed, and nothing farther that can be depended on remains on record concerning them. Even the Icelandic colony in Greenland has disappeared, and the eastern coast, on which especially it was settled, has become long inaccessible, in consequence of the immense accumulation of ice in the straits between it and Iceland. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... with a high 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 and affable to ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... they arrived at "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 ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 oblivion. More ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... the Spanish discoverers. In Yucatan and throughout the Aztec Empire it was the 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 ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... to the year 1008. The Icelandic Norsemen then ceased their investigations of the North-American Continent, and were too ignorant to realize the value of their discoveries. Their colonies on the coasts of Nova Scotia ("Vinland") and Newfoundland ("Estotiland") were attacked probably by Eskimos, at any rate ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... appears that, 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
... this tragic ballad from a milkmaid, in 1771. Mr. Child quotes a verse parallel, preserved in Faroe, and in the Icelandic. There is a similar incident in the cycle of Kullervo, in the Finnish Kalevala. Scott says that similar tragedies are common in Scotch popular poetry; such cases are "Lizzie Wan," and "The King's Dochter, Lady Jean." A sorrow nearly as bitter ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... of its childhood, to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly than the youth of Ludwig Tieck. I know not in the whole history of literature, any poet who can count up so many and so great exploits achieved on his first descent into the arena: in number and variety even Goethe ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Massachusetts Bay; and, five hundred years before the discovery of 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 of Wales and North Scotland, where their descendants still remain. Colonizing ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... than an English Dictionary. It seems to us that no Romanic derivative of the Latin root should he given, unless to show that the word has come into English by that channel. And so of the Teutonic languages. If we have Danish, Swedish, German, and Dutch, why not Scotch, Icelandic, Frisic, Swiss, and every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... arrived in England, he was accompanied according to an Icelandic Saga,(49) by King Olaf, of Norway, who assisted him in expelling the Danes from Southwark, and gaining an entrance into the city. The manner in which this was carried out, is thus described. A small knot of Danes occupied a stronghold in the City, whilst others ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... the fair hands of the nuns that have borne them, the 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 are there; ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... English term; for both babe and infant are borrowed—simply means the "product of the womb" (compare Gothic kilthei, "womb"). The Lowland-Scotch dialect still preserves an old word for "child" in bairn, cognate with Anglo-Saxon bearn, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, and Gothic barn (the Gothic had a diminutive barnilo, "baby"), Sanskrit bharna, which signifies "the borne one," "that which is born," from the primitive Indo-European root bhr, "to bear, to carry in the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... 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 in a Danish tale engaged to drive a changeling ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... view of Christiania, from the heights of Egeberg, a well-wooded hill in the southern suburb, it is difficult to believe one's self in Icelandic Scandinavia,—the precise latitude of the Shetland Islands. A drowsy hum like the drone of bees seems to float up from the busy city below. The beautiful fjord, with its graceful promontories, its picturesque ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... mental. And we live and act in a mental realm, do we not? The sick man, then, becomes one who misses the mark, and therefore a sinner. I think you will agree with me that the sick man is not at peace with God, if God is 'that which makes for righteousness.' Surely the maker of that old Icelandic sixteenth-century Bible must have been inspired when, translating from Luther's Bible, he wrote in the first chapter of Genesis, 'And God created man after His own likeness, in the likeness of Mind shaped He him.' Cannot ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... even to the language which the runes were intended to convey. Bishop Gibson, in his additions to Camden's Britannia, described the cross vaguely as "a pillar curiously engraven with some inscription upon it." In a second edition this reads, "with a Danish inscription." Later it was thought to be Icelandic, and it was Haigh who first thought that Caedmon and no other was the author of the runic verses which he deciphered, considering that there was no one living at the period to which he assigned the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... 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
... the ancients, both Greeks and Romans, 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 ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... the ancient Gothic, and its cognates, taking in very wide accessions from the Latin, the Gallic, and other languages of southern Europe; and it may be traced back, historically, till it quite penetrates through these elementary masses of change, and reveals itself in the Icelandic. Two thousand five hundred years, assuming no longer period, have not obliterated these affinities of language. Even at this day, the Anglo Saxon numerals, pronouns, most of the terms in chronology, together with a large number of its adverbs, are well preserved in the Icelandic. And had we ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... which some of them appear to have attempted to colonize long before the Norwegian outlaws went there; and some even say that from Erin came the first Europeans who landed on frozen Greenland years before the Icelandic Northmen planted establishments in that dreary country. The Celts, therefore, and those of Erin chiefly, were a ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... 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 Castle, ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... but their northern blood had been nourished for a thousand years upon the hillsides of Northern Spain, and they had become Spaniards in fact, with all Spanish beliefs and tendencies. Beyond all question Columbus took into account the Norwegian and Icelandic voyages and the voyage of Madoc with his Welsh brethren. But Columbus knew that those voyages only claimed to relate to lands lying west and north-west of the Straits of Gibraltar. But when Columbus unfurled his sails ...
— Prehistoric Structures of Central America - Who Erected Them? • Martin Ingham Townsend
... 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 San Francisco Calamity • Various
... 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 swearing in Icelandic,' ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... 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 ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... that you are a clever man. Since the dynamite outrage on the Icelandic six months ago great care has been taken in the supervision of shipments, for the fast steamers and the Oceanic Express Company require that the contents of every package shall be visibly made known to them before it can be accepted. But once it is inspected and officially ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... 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], ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... 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 hit it hard blows ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... 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 ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... 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 the ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... in the later Icelandic halls, Beowulf saw Hrothgar enthroned on a high seat at the east end of the hall. The seat is sacred. It has a supernatural quality. Grendel, the fiend, cannot approach it."—Br., p. 34. Cf. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... 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 money-resources ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... tales of the Eskimo, it is not credible that they left none of their own. Thus we are told in the Floamanna Saga how a hero, abandoned on the icy coast of Greenland, met with two giant witches (Troldkoner), and cut the band from one of them. An old Icelandic work, called the Konungs Skuggsjo (Danish, Kongespeilet), has much to say of the marvels of Greenland and its monsters of the sea. On the other hand, Morillot declares that the belief in ghosts was brought to Greenland by the Icelanders and Scandinavians. The sagas have not been as yet much studied ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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 rest is directly ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... "flippant" 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. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... 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 bestowed upon them. English women have secured eligibility to become ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... Middle Ages. In the East it was translated into Syriac(?), Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Hebrew; in the West it exists in Latin, French, Italian, German, English, Spanish, Bohemian, and Polish. As early as 1204, aKing of Norway translated it into Icelandic, and at a later time it was translated by a Jesuit missionary into Tagala, the classical language of the Philippine Islands. But this is not all, Barlaam and Josaphat have actually risen to the rank of saints, both in the Eastern and in the Western churches. In the Eastern church the 26th of August ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... through the cross embroidered on his back, a touch which is essential to the plot, none of the Homeric detail as to the wounds appears. The same remark applies to the saga of Dietrich and indeed to most others; the only cases that I have noticed which resemble the Irish in detail are in the Icelandic Sagas (the Laxdale Saga and others), and even there the feature is not at all so prominent as here, in the "Tain be Cuailnge," and several other Irish romances, though it is by no means common to all of them. It may be noted that the Irish version of the "Tale of Troy" shows this feature, and although ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... the Siegfried legend has been handed down to us in five different forms. The first of these is the poetic or older "Edda", also called Saemund's "Edda", as it was assigned to the celebrated Icelandic scholar Saemundr Sigfusson. The "Codex Regius", in which it is preserved, dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, but is probably a copy of an older manuscript. The songs it contains were written at various ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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
... easily obtained, nor even always accessible to the increasing 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 ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... translated from the Icelandic says that the mountainlike ruins of this majestic glacier so covered the sea that as far as the eye could reach no open water was discoverable, even from the highest peaks. A monster wall or barrier of ice ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... move forward 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
... speaking, but little perceptible. 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 ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... I could not think Political Economy 'the most exciting thing in the world,' as he used to call it. Nor could I without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris' interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young socialist that he was, thought 'glorious.' He had begun to write an Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of verses. None of these pleased ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... The probable author 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. ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... had 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 principal thoroughfare of communication ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... Susanna prepared the 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 ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... now perhaps for the first time offered with a critical discussion of their historical sources; lastly, because the old legends seem to show how the fancy of periods less critical than ours dealt with such facts as are now reported in a dull undramatic manner. Thus (1) the Icelandic ghost stories have peculiar literary merit as simple dramatic narratives. (2) Every one has heard of the Wesley ghost, Sir George Villiers's spectre, Lord Lyttelton's ghost, the Beresford ghost, Mr. Williams's ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... Icelandic poetry, or the Edda of Saemund, translated by Amos Cottle; and the Oberon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... comprehension of the rude men of the times, so they invented the deities who were more nearly akin to the material forces that these people alone understood. The second part of the first Edda contains the great Icelandic poems, the first of which is the song of Voland, the ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... 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 ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... 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
... languages Scott had slight knowledge, though he was always interested in the northern literatures. In a review of the Poems of William Herbert, of which the part most interesting to the reviewer consisted of translations from the Icelandic, Scott says: "We do not pretend any great knowledge of Norse; but we have so far traced the 'Runic rhyme' as to be sensible how much more easy it is to give a just translation of that poetry into English than into Latin." In the same ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... 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. p. ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from the cloud, says Mr. Kelly, [12] "that contained the heavenly fire from which the plant is sprung." Whilst speaking, too, of the fern-seed's property of making people invisible, it is of interest to note that in the Icelandic and Pomeranian myths the schamir or "raven-stone" renders its possessor invisible; and according to a North German tradition the luck-flower is enbued with the same wonderful qualities. It is essential, however, that the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... again while he told her about Mrs. Thorlakson, the good-hearted Icelandic woman, and the giant Swede section-hand, Svenson, who was a friendly sort of elephant. He tried to entertain her with a humorous account of his surveying experiences, information about the country and funny stories that ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... 'percussive noises'. The Norsemen of the Viking age were given to second sight, and Glam 'riding the roofs,' made disturbances worthy of a spectre peculiarly able-bodied. But, not counting the evidence of the Icelandic sagas, mediaeval literature, like classical literature, needs to be carefully sifted before it yields a few grains of such facts as sane and educated witnesses even now aver to be matter of their personal experience. No doubt the beliefs were prevalent, the Latin prayer proves that, but examples ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... conducting their own experimental 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. ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... or Tarn (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. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... so on. And dear Brer 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... is the first Icelandic play to be done into English. Very probably, the well-informed reader will wonder, not so much that a translation 'should be so late in forthcoming,' but that, of all things, there should exist a dramatic literature worthy the name in that Ultima Thule. He is, ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... or by whom these myth-stories were first put into writing, nor when they assumed the shape in which we now have them. But it is said, that, about the year 1100, an Icelandic scholar called Saemund the Wise collected a number of songs and poems into a book which is now known as the "Elder Edda;" and that, about a century later, Snorre Sturleson, another Icelander, wrote a prose-work of a similar character, which is called the "Younger ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... London, was a solicitor, and becoming interested in the study of Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon literature, pub. the results of his researches in his History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805). Thereafter he continued the narrative in History of England (1814-29), carrying it on to the end of the reign of Elizabeth. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the sons of ORRORS. They were both Homeric, 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 a dislike ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... probably occupy a period partly Pagan and partly Christian, and it has been conjectured that all or most of those discovered had their source in Ireland, with a possibility of an earlier importation into Ireland by Icelandic, Danish, or other peoples. Many of these stones have been found buried in the ruins of old churches, and most of them may be supposed to owe their preservation to some such protection. The drawings of one or two may be given as samples. Those here sketched (Figs. 100 and 101) are ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... 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 ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... country of 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 periodicals ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... strange indeed 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 Stimulation, which is more frequent in operation, ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... observation, and its exact nature is as undetermined to-day as it was a hundred years ago. There has been no dearth of theories concerning it, however. Blot, who studied it in the Shetland Islands in 1817, thought it due to electrified ferruginous dust, the origin of which he ascribed to Icelandic volcanoes. Much more recently the idea of ferruginous particles has been revived, their presence being ascribed not to volcanoes, but to the meteorites constantly being dissipated in the upper atmosphere. Ferruginous dust, presumably of such origin, has ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Icelandic, Red Indian, and other stories here. They were translated by Miss Cheape, Miss Alma, and Miss Thyra Alleyne, Miss Sellar, Mr. Craigie (he did the Icelandic tales), Miss Blackley, Mrs. Dent, and Mrs. Lang, but the Red ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... at the curtain at the far end of the room. 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
... which books were spread from one end of Europe to the other. 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 or such a work, composed in Morocco or in Cairo, was known at Paris and at Cologne ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... beliefs. In the story of Grettir, both the art of the novelist and the lore of the archaeologist have had full scope, with the result that we have a narrative of adventure of the most romantic kind, and at the same time an interesting and minutely accurate account of the old Icelandic families, their homes, their mode of life, their superstitions, their songs and stories, their bear-serk fury, and their heroism by land and sea. The story is told throughout with a simplicity which will make ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... 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 by a ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... 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 water and steam, creating a disturbance ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... 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 facts. As far as the author of the present work has had experience ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... 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 Castle, and that of the 'Laidly ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... 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
... Lithend is 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, ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... 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 ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... 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
... huracan; in Portuguese, furacan; in French, ouragan; in German, Danish, and Swedish, orcan—all of them signifying a storm; while in Latin furo, or furio, means to rage. And are not the old Swedish hurra, to be driven along; our own word hurried; the Icelandic word hurra, to be rattled over frozen ground, all derived from the same root from which the god of the abyss, Hurakan, obtained his name? The last thing a people forgets is the name of their god; we retain to this day, in the names ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... 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 ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... IVAR 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 beg her to wait for him. But on his later coming to Iceland, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson |
