"Icelandic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Thorvaldsen, 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 ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... 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 it a great misfortune ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... p.121. 'The Icelandic fare is not more inviting than the houses. Stockfish and butter eaten in alternate mouthfuls form the ordinary materials of a meal. The former, however, has to be pummelled on a stone anvil with a sledge hammer before even the natives can bite it; and, after ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... the boudoir on the first floor, and climbs lazily. The sentimental face and the clay with a crack in it are Marriot's. Gilray, who has been rehearsing his part in the new original comedy from the Icelandic, ceases muttering and feels his way along his dark lobby. Jimmy pins a notice on his door, "Called away on business," and crosses to me. Soon we are all in the old room again, Jimmy on the hearth-rug, Marriot in the cane chair; the curtains are pinned together with a pen-nib, and the five of ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... 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 ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... 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 ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... (A.D. 876) after Ingolf had come to Iceland, a sea-rover, Gunnbiorn, driven in his ship westerly, sighted a strange land, and the report that he made was not forgotten. Fifty years later, more or less, for we must treat the dates of the Icelandic sagas with some reservation, we learn that a wind-tossed vessel was thrown upon a coast far away, which was called Iceland the Great. Then, again, we read of a young Norwegian, Eric the Red, not apparently averse to a brawl, who killed his man in Norway and fled to Iceland, where he kept his ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... 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
... to notice that a similar exploit is recorded in the Scandinavian Legends, and may be traced, under many variations of circumstances and events, in the Icelandic, Danish, and Norwegian poetry, affording another intimation of the source from whence our popular mythology ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... 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 lighthouse ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... From him Saxo borrowed a multitude of phrases, sometimes apt but often crabbed and deformed, as well as an exemplary and homiletic turn of narrative. Other idioms, and perhaps the practice of interspersing verses amid prose (though this also was a twelfth century Icelandic practice), Saxo found in a fifth-century writer, Martianus Capella, the pedantic author of the "De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii" Such models may have saved him from a base mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not worthy of him, and they must ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... 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 ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... 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 ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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 tenth century, have been also exised, and with them the index. There remains the ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... 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 occurs ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... is not a brother, or brothers, but a treacherous friend or a secret, cowardly rival, who attempts the life of the hero and claims the credit and reward for his bold achievement. Many examples must occur to readers familiar with Icelandic, Norwegian, and German folk-tales which need not here be cited. In the old French romance of the Chevalier Berinus and his gallant son Aigres de l'Aimant, the King of Loquiferne is in love with the Princess Melia, daughter of a king named Absalon, who would give her ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... 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
... both these Gilberts became successively Earls of 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 in the period covered ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... answered 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 ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... seldom go far outside those limits otherwise than by accident or for works of reference. On the contrary, the English and American collections are cosmopolitan, like those who have formed them. At the British Museum a volume in Icelandic, Chinese, Hawaian, or any other character is welcomed nearly as much as one in the vernacular. In Germany, at all events at Berlin and Vienna, English books of importance are recognised. But at the Bibliotheque in Paris it is not so. The French ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ &c. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the “Saga Library.” Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnússon, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 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 ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... for night hags are termed aluinnen, and aluen, which is sometimes Latinized eluoe. But the prototype of the English elf, is to be sought chiefly in the berg-elfen, or duergar, of the Scandinavians. From the most early of the Icelandic Sagas, as well as from the Edda itself, we learn the belief of the northern nations in a race of dwarfish spirits, inhabiting the rocky mountains, and approaching, in some respects, to the human nature. Their attributes, amongst which we recognize the features of the modern ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... 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
... 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
... 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 word geysa—to ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... 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 dream of Mr. Perceval's murder, and so forth. But the original sources have not, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... 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 him, though to me they seemed very like his master's. I can ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... 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 a ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the direct effect of the calamity, and by the famine due to the ravaging of the fields and the frightening of the fish from the shores which it induced, destroyed nearly one fifth of the Icelandic people. It is, in fact, to be remembered as one of the three or four most calamitous eruptions of which we have any account, and, from the point of view of lava flow, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... 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 ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... and it is really difficult to estimate the quantity of valuable matter which is thus deposited in obscure but still accessible places. A deal of useful work, too, has been done in the way of translation; and where the book to be dealt with is an Icelandic saga, a chronicle in Saxon, in Irish Celtic, or even in old Norman, one may confess to the weakness of letting the original remain, in some instances, unexamined, and drawing one's information with ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... 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 Syria and Egypt, and ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Wise," an Icelandic priest and scald. He compiled the Elder or Rythmical Edda, often called Saemund's Edda. This compilation contains not only mythological tales and moral sentences, but numerous sagas in verse ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... that we owe to 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 of valuable information which was long unknown ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... bifurcated by day keep by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each separate leg swathed in complete divorcement from its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the common dormitory of a shirt de nuit? The Englishman does wear pajamas, but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, "doom'd for a certain term to walk the night," I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake. If Saint Sebastian, who, I take it, ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... my great pleasure I perceive that the books have all arrived safe. But I find that, instead of an Icelandic Grammar, you have lent me an Essay on the origin of the Icelandic Language, which I here return. Thorlakson's Grave-ode is superlatively fine, and I translated it this morning, as I breakfasted. I have just finished a translation of Baggesen's beautiful ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... rock, and in 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 a ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... so famous in the 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 ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... years ago, few if any of them have been made accessible to the average English reader. Now the Gyldendal Publishing Company of Copenhagen has undertaken the neglected task of producing English translations of the best Scandinavian fiction, the latest of which is Guest the One-Eyed, by the Icelandic novelist, GUNNAR GUNNARSSON. It is not a particularly powerful narrative, and is marked by the characteristic inconsequence that tends to convert the Scandinavian novel into a melange of family biographies; yet the author has been successful in weaving into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... ours this month-the first from an esteemed Philadelphia correspondent—the second from another of the same State, but more inland. The following, we may observe, is written in the measure which most prevails in Icelandic poems: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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, and Mr. Bottomley ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... 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 ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... 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 of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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
... the first European to visit America, if the Icelandic records are true, christened the new land Wineland. It has been supposed that this designation was given for the grapes, but recent investigations show that the fruits were probably mountain cranberries. Captain John Hawkins, who visited the Spanish ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... on whose judgment we relied were to speak in these terms of a book that was only to be read in Persian or Icelandic, how cheerfully we should bend ourselves to the task of learning these difficult tongues for the sake of the reward—the possession of the coveted thought. But the writings of Emerson are in our own language and accessible in the cheapest editions. If to us personally ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... 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
... 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 cathedrals that have remained are but ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... 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
... 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. ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... a 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 day I should probably have to ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... made me in love with a cold climate 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 in northern poems ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... 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 I ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... California who may desire to stand up for my honor; place him before you at the usual distance of ten paces; then name any friend of yours at present in Europe as a similar substitute for yourself—the principals only to use pistols—notify me by the Icelandic telegraph when you are ready, and then, upon return of signal, pop away at my friend. But, since it is not my wish to proceed to such an extremity unnecessarily, if you will admit that I may possibly ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... Bringing a ship up suddenly with an anchor, and short range of cable, yet without jerking. [Said to be from the Icelandic snubba.] ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... character. Buddhism had already been in China more than a thousand years, and these prayers are far enough from its teachings. May we not believe that the ideas here expressed had always existed in the minds of the more devout rulers of the empire? In similar language, the Edda of the Icelandic ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... 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
... 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 than seven hundred years separate Johann Sigurjonsson ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... interesting of the primitive bowed instruments is the Welsh Crwth. Unlike the still more ancient forms yet surviving in the East, it is now completely obsolete: unless we may count the Norwegian and Icelandic langspiel and fidla as ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... 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 to the same ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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
... 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
... and case as in English denoted by position. If he wished to show 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
... mentioned. That the Norsemen made a settlement in this country, though only of brief duration, is a fact in support of which many learned treatises have been written, dealing, among other things, with what are supposed to be Icelandic inscriptions discovered in that section of the country, and the like, a consideration of which, however, would be beyond the ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... (1) Another instance of the old Norse or Icelandic tongue having been generally known ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... 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. Tarn Watling and Blellum Tarn, though on lower ground than other ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... 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 monument, who could have composed such a poem but the first of all the English nation ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... 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 History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... get help from Sweyn, of Denmark, and failing that, from Harold Hardraade of Norway. But how he sped there must be read in the words of a cunninger saga-man than this chronicler, even in those of the "Icelandic Homer," ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... few cases where the phenomena of rate have been studied with due attention, is in the evolution of the three languages of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden out of the Icelandic. What does this tell us? The last has altered so slowly that a modern Icelander can read the oldest works of his language. In Sweden, however, the speech has altered. So it has in Denmark; whilst both these languages are unintelligible to the Icelander, and vice versa. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... 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 known about the epic that one cannot safely make any positive statement ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Rommany reached England, 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 ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... 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 ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are havre, which suggests O.N. hafrar, goats. Modern Icelandic has hafraroats, but the word is not found in the ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... An Icelandic Saga relating the adventures of a Viking, Orvar Odd in Aquitaine, describes how he saw some of the natives taking refuge in an underground retreat, and how he pursued and killed them all. [Footnote: Fornmanna Soegwr, ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... 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
... 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 etymological sense, to Lalage's ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... retained an old proverb which ascribes to 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 duel, ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... touching the latter point, it is 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 ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... 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 ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... in the popular Icelandic saga of "Howard the Halt" tradition has recorded with minute detail of approbation the story of a man and woman, old, weak, friendless, who, in spite of terrible odds, succeeded in obtaining a late but sufficing vengeance for the cruel slaughter ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... head 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... vegetation is invigorated by the genial climate of that country! Among the luxuriant flowers there met with, groves, or forests, if I may so call them, of Monks-hood are frequently seen; the plant of deep, rich blue, and as tall as in our gardens; and this at an elevation where, in Cumberland, Icelandic moss would only be found, or the stony summits be ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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 brought with them; ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 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 air by means of a pipe, whose lower orifice is at the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... crants,] i.e., virgin garlands. Nares, in his Glossary, says that crants is a German word, and probably Icelandic.] ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... Forby reasons 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 of its avoiding ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... forces; Police, Coast Guard; note - Iceland's defense is provided by the US-manned Icelandic Defense ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... has been devoted to the elucidation of the Icelandic Sagas, or vague accounts of voyages which Bjorne Heriulfson and Lief Ericsson, sons of the first Norse settlers of Greenland, are supposed to have made at the end of the tenth century, to the eastern parts of what is now British North America, and, in the opinion of ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... says Thorkel to Bork, in the Icelandic saga of Gisli the Outlaw, "bear in mind that a woman's counsel is always unlucky."—On the other hand, quoth Panurge, "Truly I have found a great deal of good in the counsel of women, chiefly in that of ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Welsh means a ghost or goblin. It is probably the same with the Icelandic Paki, an evil spirit. But on this etymology our correspondent can consult an article by Sir F. Palgrave, on the "Popular Mythology of the Middle Ages." in the Quarterly Review, vol. xxii.; a paper, by Mr. Thoms, on the "Folk Lore of Shakspeare," No. 6.; "Puck's several Names," in The ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... me, and 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various |
