"Icelandic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... others, the well-known Icelandic poet and diplomatist, Grimur Thomsen, who bore the title of Counsellor of Legation. His compatriots were very proud of him. Icelandic students declared that Grimur possessed twelve dress shirts, three pairs ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... 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 ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... not contented with merely architectural forms in colourless cathedrals, but decorated them with carvings painted in gay colours, used every space for pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... history of its installation there is no hint that the men who set up this Icelandic Commonwealth had any sense of the need, or even of the feasibility, of such a coercive government as would be involved in concerted preparation for the common defense. Subjection to personal rule, or to official rule in any degree of attenuation, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... 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 ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... matter in dispute among philologists, and I am no authority. Some say that Caesar meant the Isle of Man when he spoke of Mona; others say he meant Anglesea. The present name is modern. So is Elian Vannin, its Manx equivalent. In the Icelandic Sagas the island is called Mon. Elsewhere it is called Eubonia. One historian thinks the island derives its name from Mannin—in being an old Celtic word for island, therefore Meadhon-in (pronounced Mannin) would signify: The middle island. That definition requires that ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... springs, whose tepid waters issue as gently as an ordinary spring, are called Langers, or baths; others that throw up boiling water with great noise, are denominated Caldrons, in Icelandic 'Hverer.' The most remarkable is the Geyser, which is found near Skalholdt, in the middle of a plain, where there are about forty springs of a smaller size. It rises from an aperture nineteen feet in diameter, springing at intervals to the height of fifty or even ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... 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
... while conversing with the railway guard. Old Mr. Berkley, Mr. Sylvester. Berkley and I had once breakfasted together at Brighton, the first sitting in a tub, the second eating nothing but raw macerated beef, and I for my part devouring toast and Icelandic poetry. The nephew had since gone into diplomacy to strengthen his bile. I had not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... intelligence, he seemed to live in a fantastic dream, as Edgar Poe must have lived. He had translated into English a volume of strange Icelandic legends, which I ardently desired to see translated into French. He loved the supernatural, the dismal and grewsome, but he spoke of the most marvellous things with a calmness that was typically English, to which his gentle ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with a hammer. It got white where ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... of Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic "Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites, songs, and traditions. These began to fall under the notice of scholars about the middle ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... and popular 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 ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... 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 became a leader. His ideals were largely identical with those ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... stage already outgrown by Europe and Africa. These continents from Lapland to the Hottentot country were using iron. Prior to the voyage of the great Genoese, Europe gave nothing to America and received nothing from it, except the Gulf Stream's scanty cargo of driftwood stranded on bleak Icelandic shores. The Tertiary land-bridge across the North Atlantic between Norway and Greenland may possibly have guided a pre-Caucasic migration to America and given that continent part of its aboriginal population.[756] However, no trace of any ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Chatterton's career (1752-1770) was a 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 seek for new 'motives,' and to discover merits in old forms of ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... instinctive duplicity which would fain regard this antithesis as no antithesis at all: just as Wagner did,—and his mastery in this kind of falseness was of no mean order. To cast side-long glances at master-morality, at noble morality (—Icelandic saga is perhaps the greatest documentary evidence of these values), and at the same time to have the opposite teaching, the "gospel of the lowly," the doctrine of the need of salvation, on one's lips!{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Incidentally, I admire the ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... (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
... 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
... the creation. Under the auspices of Archbishop Absalon the monks of Sor began to compile the annals of Denmark, and at the end of the 12th century Svend Aagesen, a cleric of Lund, compiled from Icelandic sources and oral tradition his Compendiosa historia regum Daniae. The great Saxo Grammaticus (q.v.) wrote his Historia Danica ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the 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 ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... dreamed of in our 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 every one in ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... 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 ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... under the patronage of Blue-tooth, Hakon, with the 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
... the Devil in hell and wants to serve him, and sees the pains in which souls are imprisoned standing beside the fire. Full of pity, he lifts up the lids and sets the souls free, on which the Devil at once drives him away. A somewhat similar notion occurs in an Icelandic tale of the Sin Sacks, in Powell and Magnusson's collection (second series, p. 48). And in T. Crofton Croker's "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland," ed. 1828, Part. ii. p. 30 ff., we read of Soul Cages ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Christian times they went as far as the Faroe group, even as far as Iceland, 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 ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... 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 ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... 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
... pottage in the children's sight (there are twins in this case) and taken out as a dinner for the reapers who happened to be cutting the rye and oats. In Glamorganshire the woman declares she is mixing a pasty for the reapers. An Icelandic legend makes a woman set a pot containing food to cook on the fire and fasten twigs end to end in continuation of the handle of a spoon until the topmost one appears above the chimney, when she puts the bowl in the pot. Another woman in a Danish tale engaged to drive a changeling out of the house ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... the 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
... 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 irritated Pagan ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... have shaped the true form of heroic poetry. We can see that its elementary principles, the methods of composition in verse and prose, are essentially the same in all times and countries, in the Iliad, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the old Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon poems, and to some extent in the French Chansons de Geste; they might be used to-morrow for a heroic subject by any one gifted with the requisite skill, imagination, and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... 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, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... one who knows nothing of philology venture to inquire whether the very close agreement of this tweet with our sweet (compare also the Anglo-Saxon swete, the Icelandic soetr, and the Sanskrit svad) does not point to a common origin of ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... 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 ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... 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, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... their fairy tales, you will find in this collection examples of English, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian, Icelandic, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, Arabian, Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese fairy tales, as well as those recited around the lodge fires at night by American Indians for the entertainment of the ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... literatures which cannot well be treated under the alphabetical list of authors, he will find special essays by competent scholars on the Accadian-Babylonian literature, on the Egyptian, the Hindu, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Icelandic, the Celtic, and others, followed by selections many of which have been specially translated for this Work. In these literatures names of ascertained authors are given in the Index. The intention of the essays is to acquaint the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 and only time this prize ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... 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 ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... of Zschokke's admirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and I think I began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These authors I recall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelessly as they passed through my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandic poems, in the metre of "Hiawatha"; I had for a while a notion of studying Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and decided that I would learn the language later. By this time I must have begun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author at least, as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 of the ballads which ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... respect for him that I'd never had before, anyway," rejoined Smith. "Think of the old General knowing anything at all about Icelandic sagas—and the offhand way he picked out the anachronism and smashed it in the eye. No—so far as I am concerned, he is entitled to his holiday. Long may it wave—especially as I hope to see you, if you'll let me, while if it were an ordinary business ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... fabrics, and has affected the taste in household art in both England and America. Nevertheless he is best known as a poet. His finest poems are "The Earthly Paradise," a series of Norse legends, "Three Northern Stones," translated from Icelandic poems, and his translations of "The ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... looking-glasses, of the ancients were usually made of metal, either a composition of tin and copper, or silver; but in later times, alloy was mixed with the silver. Pliny mentions the obsidian stone, or, as it is now called, the Icelandic agate, as being used for this purpose. Nero is said to have used emeralds for mirrors. Pliny the Elder says that mirrors were made in the glass-houses of Sidon, which consisted of glass plates, with leaves of metal at the back; they were probably ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... reached Vendilskaga, as Skagen is called in the old Norse and Icelandic writings. For miles and miles, interspersed with sand-hills and cultivated land, houses, farms, and drifting sand-banks, stretched, and stretch still, towards Gammel-Skagen, Wester and Osterby, out to ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... scientific association is one of the most important in Northern Europe, and its members include many of the most distinguished savans of Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It possesses an excellent library, which contains, amongst other things of great value, about 2000 Icelandic manuscripts, very ancient, and written in the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... 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. ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... by Lye from the Icelandic Tiorn, stagnum, palus) is rendered in our dictionaries as synonymous with Mere or Lake; but it is properly a large Pool or Reservoir in the Mountains, commonly the Feeder of some Mere in the valleys. Tarn Watling and Blellum Tarn, though on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 bestowed upon them. English women have secured eligibility ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... trace of any sort of a 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, ending ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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, ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... that the action was done by shooting, he would probably not vary the form of the verb kill, but would use the verb kute, meaning shoot whether with arrow or bullet. Except that the Dak. order corresponds to the Icelandic the only difference in structure between the Dak. and English expression is that the Dakota word kte may mean any time, the particular time being indicated whenever desirable in all cases in Dak. as mostly in English by auxiliary verbs and adverbs. If the word man were represented ...
— The Dakotan Languages, and Their Relations to Other Languages • Andrew Woods Williamson
... man to discover the shores of the United States, according to Icelandic records, was an Icelander, Leif Erickson, who sailed in the year 1000, and spent the winter somewhere on the New England coast. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese in the Spanish service, discovered San Salvador, one of the Bahama Islands, on October 12, 1492. He thought that he had ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... of the Scandinavian Hall "offers in most respects not likeness, but a striking contrast to the early Greek hall." Mr. Monro, who was not aware of the parallel which I had drawn between the Homeric and Icelandic houses, accepted it on evidence more recent than that of Sir George Dasent. Cf. his Odyssey, vol. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... completely buried beneath them. Over this city the mud accumulated to the depth of over 70 feet. In addition to these phenomena, molten lava often flows from the lip of the crater, occasionally in vast quantities. In the Icelandic eruption of 1783 the lava streams were so great in quantity as to fill river gorges 600 ft. deep and 200 ft. wide, and to extend over an open plain to a distance of 12 to 15 miles, forming lakes of lava 100 feet deep. The volcanoes of Hawaii often send forth streams of lava which cover an ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... true as between Morris and Rossetti: "They received or re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one case of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine." Morris was twice a Norman, in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; and in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. His visits to Italy left him cold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North. "With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. In spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, and this much more in Italy, where there is such ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 that the fire will manifestly ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... Oriental and 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
... 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. ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... 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
... According to Professor Anderson's etymology of the word, it means "the darkness of the gods"; from regin, gods, and rkr, darkness; but it may, more properly, be derived from the Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish regn, a rain, and rk, smoke, or dust; and it may mean the rain of dust, for the clay came first as dust; it is described in some ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Owyne (Owain, 'the King's son Urien,' Ywaine, etc.), with the subsequent transformation, has a parallel in an Icelandic saga. Rehabilitation in human shape by means of a kiss is a common tale in the Scandinavian area; occasionally three ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Hygelac, and then retreats before Beowulf. At a later time Beowulf avenges the death of Heardred by supporting Eadgils, "son of Ohthere" (137 [2393]), in an invasion of Sweden, in which Onela is slain. See also Eadgils; and compare the slaying of Ali by Athils on the ice of Lake Wener in the Icelandic "Heimskringla." ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... Grenelli, 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 ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... A.-S. feoh, cattle. "Cattle," says Bosworth, "was the first kind of property; and, by bartering, this word came to signify money in general." So, too, the word penny is from A.-S. penig, Icelandic peningr, cattle. The word penny, as in this country the word dollar, is ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... their Influence on the English Race.—2. The Mythology.—3. The Scandinavian Languages.—4. Icelandic, or Old Norse Literature: the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Scalds, the Sagas, the "Heimskringla." The Folks-Sagas and Ballads of the Middle Ages.—5. Danish Literature: Saxo Grammaticus and Theodoric; Arreboe, Kingo, Tycho Brahe, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... been followed by the publication of 579 papers, which is the number now issued in the state according to the last official list obtainable. They appear daily, weekly and monthly, in nearly all written languages, English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Bohemian, and one in Icelandic, ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art; altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still: this is the Younger or Prose Edda. By these and the numerous other Sagas, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see that old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget that it is erroneous Religion; let us look ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 nature remains ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Americanae," gives notices of numerous Icelandic voyages to American and other lands of the West. The existence of a great country southwest of Greenland is referred to, not as a matter of speculation merely, but as something perfectly well known. ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... 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; and human sacrifice ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... ablative, locative, instrumental) had been already reduced to four (nominative genitive, dative, accusative). We know this from a careful comparison of and reconstruction based on the oldest Germanic dialects of which we still have records (Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Anglo-Saxon). In the group of West Germanic dialects, for the study of which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our oldest and most valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but the phonetic form of the case syllables ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his pack, dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his presence. For Brodie, callously brutish as he was, must be something less than human not to turn his chill blue Icelandic eyes toward the spot where he had abandoned ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... 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 ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... 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
... first page of his history, pronounces the story of the discovery of our country by the Icelandic Northmen, a narrative "mythological in form and obscure in meaning"; and adds that "no clear historical evidence establishes the natural probability that they accomplished the passage." But the first volume of Bancroft was published ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... 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 ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... would not afford us a short cut to our destination. He told us that it was full of hidden rocks and sandbanks, and called our attention to some enigmatic object which rose in midchannel like a deer's horns from the sea. "There," he said, "are the masts of an Icelandic steamer which attempted two years ago to make that passage, and was lost. To reach Westray in safety we must double its farthest promontory." An hour or two later this feat was accomplished. We were once more in ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... 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. ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... 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, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... 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
... 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 ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... countries. She has never seen them, or she says she never has. That is a little matter to her; she knows all about them, twenty times as much as I do, though I used to travel till I hated the sight of a railway or a steamer. She tells me things about Sicily, and Norway, and the Hebrides,—old Icelandic legends,—about Burnt Njal, and those people; she makes me want to see the places, actually. There are plenty of places I have not seen. She says Iceland is a flower-garden in summer. Margaret, don't laugh at what ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... where a river ran through a lake into 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 which they had ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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 occurs in the French "Milk White Dove": ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... Heims-Kringla of Snorre Tarleson," he said, "the celebrated Icelandic author of the twelfth century—it is a true and correct account of the Norwegian princes ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... society is 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, wintered in Vineland on the shores of Mount Hope Bay. Longfellow's Skeleton ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... Icelandic, and his next published works were translations of some of the Icelandic sagas, writings composed from six to nine hundred years ago, and containing a mass of legends, histories and romances finely told in a noble language. These translations were followed in 1876 by his great epic poem, ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... 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 ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... 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 ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Icelandic "family" Sagas, on the other hand, I found in abundance what I required in the shape of human garb for the moods, conceptions, and thoughts which at that time occupied me, or were, at least, more or less distinctly present in my mind. With ...
— The Feast at Solhoug • Henrik Ibsen
... the language, the word 'worm' had a somewhat different meaning from that in use to-day. It was an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon 'wyrm,' meaning a dragon or snake; or from the Gothic 'waurms,' a serpent; or the Icelandic 'ormur,' or the German 'wurm.' We gather that it conveyed originally an idea of size and power, not as now in the diminutive of both these meanings. Here legendary history helps us. We have the well-known legend of the 'Worm Well' of Lambton ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... wood fire. The room is fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that of the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all the world—language so simple that even great scholars could find no simpler, and the children ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... and the rapidity with 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. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... regular armed forces; Icelandic National Police, Icelandic Coast Guard (Islenska Landhelgisgaeslan) subordinate to Ministry of Justice, Icelandic Crisis Response ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... word "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 ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... he got 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, Ikon Navrojk: ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... as is well known, is proved by the fact that, when the cattle-fines were converted into money-fines, the sheep was rated at ten, and the ox at a hundred asses (Festus, v. -peculatus-, p. 237, comp. pp. 34, 144; Gell. xi. i; Plutarch, Poplicola, ii). By a similar adjustment the Icelandic law makes twelve rams equivalent to a cow; only in this as in other instances the Germanic law has substituted the duodecimal ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... mask of cheerfulness, and even of obesity, however, I continue to guard the sensitive feelings of my earlier days. Yes: under this abnormal convexity are fostered, as behind a lens, the glowing tendencies of my youth. Though no longer, like the Harold described in Icelandic verse by Regner Hairy-Breeches, "a young chief proud of my flowing locks," yet I still "spend my mornings among the young maidens," or such of them as frequent the American Colony, as we call it, in Paris. I still "love to converse with the handsome widows." Miss Ashburton, who in one little passage ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... 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
... the well-known scholar who spent many years in gathering materials for an Icelandic Dictionary. Mr. Cleasby died in 1847, but the work he had planned was not published until 1874, when it appeared under the editorship of Mr. Vigfusson,[A] assisted by Sir ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... story we 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, ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... disorder of my room, in spite also of the tobacco smoke of which the Dean did not approve, all went off well, though, I confess, I felt somewhat ashamed. In the same interview the Dean asked me about an Icelandic Dictionary which had been offered to the press by Cleasby and Dasent. "Surely it is a small barbarous island," he said, "and how can they have any literature?" I tried, as well as I could, to explain to the ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... Bere barley. Cf. A.S. baerlic, Icelandic, barr, meaning barley, the grain used for making malt for ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... looked with curious affection at the inscription in faded gold letters that ran along it. The inscription read, 'Blarulfsgarth,' and he remembered ever so far back asking what that inscription meant, and being told that it was Icelandic, and that it meant the Garth, or Farm, of the Blue Wolf. And he remembered, too, being told the tale from which the name came, a tale that was related of an ancestor of his, real or imaginary, who ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... Vinland now became very frequent matters of consideration, for these expeditions were considered both lucrative and honorable." The following appears in Wheaton's History of the Northmen: "A part of Thorfinn's company remained in Vinland, and were afterward joined by two Icelandic chieftains. * * In the year 1059, it is said, an Irish or Saxon priest named Jon or John, who had spent some time in Iceland, went to preach to the colonists in Vinland, where he was murdered by the heathen." The following is from the Introduction to Henderson's Iceland: "In ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... 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 ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... brought to England during the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Parts of the material, such as the dragon-fights, are purely mythical. They relate to Beowa, a superman, of whom many legends were told by Scandinavian minstrels. The Grendel legend, for example, appears in the Icelandic saga of Gretti, who slays the dragon Glam. Other parts of Beowulf are old battle songs; and still others, relating to King Hygelac and his nephew, have some historical foundation. So little is ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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 ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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
... who had absolutely declined to speak anywhere in public, wrote to Isabella that he could not refuse anything that Mr. Wade asked. Did you know that Howland's lecture, 'What Pellerinism Means,' has been translated into twenty-two languages, and gone into a fifth edition in Icelandic? Why, that reminds me," Miss Fosdick broke off—"I've never heard what became of your queer friend—what was his name?—whom you and Bob Wade accused me of spiriting away after that very lecture. And I've never seen you since you rushed ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris |
