Then she had above a hundred thousand inhabitants, now she has scarcely half that number; then she had many rich and powerful families, now mediocrity or poverty is the universal lot; then she was renowned all over the North as the seat of learning and the cradle of literature, now, were it not for her remarkable physical features, no traveller would ever think of landing on her rugged shores.
CHAPTER VII.
THE ICELANDERS.
54. REYKJAVIK, THE CAPITAL OF ICELAND.
54. REYKJAVIK, THE CAPITAL OF ICELAND.
Skalholt.—Reykjavik.—The Fair.—The Peasant and the Merchant.—A Clergyman in his Cups.—Hay-making.—The Icelander’s Hut.—Churches.—Poverty of the Clergy.—Jon Thorlaksen.—The Seminary of Reykjavik.—Beneficial Influence of the Clergy.—Home Education.—The Icelander’s Winter’s Evening.—Taste for Literature.—The Language.—The Public Library at Reykjavik.—The Icelandic Literary Society.—Icelandic Newspapers.—Longevity.—Leprosy.—Travelling in Iceland.—Fording the Rivers.—Crossing of the Skeidara by Mr. Holland.—A Night’s Bivouac.
Next to Thingvalla, there is no place in Iceland so replete with historical interest as Skalholt, its ancient capital. Here in the eleventh century was founded the first school in the island; here was the seat of its first bishops; here flourished a succession of great orators, historians, and poets; Isleif, the oldest chronicler of the North; Gissur, who in the beginning of the twelfth century had visited all the countries of Europe and spoke all their languages; the philologian Thorlak, and Finnur Johnson, the learned author of the “Ecclesiastical History of Iceland.” The Cathedral of Skalholt was renowned far and wide for its size, and in the year 1100, Latin, poetry, music, and rhetoric, the four liberal arts, were taught in its school, more than they were at that time in many of the large European cities. As a proof how early the study of the ancients flourished in Skalholt, we find it recorded that in the twelfth century a bishop once caught a scholar reading Ovid’s “Art of Love;” and as the story relates that the venerable pastor flew into a violent passion at the sight of the unholy book, we may without injustice conclude that he must have read it himself in some of his leisure hours, to know its character so well.