G. P. Marsh translated P. E. Müller’s “Origin, progress, and decline of Icelandic historical literature” in The American Eclectic (N. Y., 1841,—vols. i., ii.). In 1781, Lindblom printed at Paris a French translation of Bishop Troil’s Lettres sur l’Islande, which contained a catalogue of books on Iceland and an enumeration of the Icelandic sagas. (Cf. Pinkerton’s Voyages, vol. i.) Chavanne’s Bibliography of the Polar Regions, p. 95, has a section on Iceland.
Solberg’s list of illustrative works, appended to Anderson’s version of Horn’s Lit. of the Scandinavian North, is useful so far as the English language goes. Periodical contributions also appear in Poole’s Index (p. 622) and Supplement, p. 214.
Burton (Ultima Thule, i. 239) enumerates the principal writers on Iceland from Arngrimur Jónsson down, including the travellers of this century.
[583] The more general histories of Scandinavia, like Sinding’s English narrative,—not a good book, but accessible,—yield the comparisons more readily.
[584] There are also German (Gotha, 1844-75) and French versions (Paris). The best German version, Geschichte Schwedens (Hamburg and Gotha, 1832-1887), is in six volumes, a part of the Geschichte der europäischen Staaten. Vol. 1-3, by E. G. Geijer, is translated by O. P. Leffler; vol. 4, by F. F. Carlson, is translated by J. G. Petersen; vol. 5, 6, by F. F. Carlson.
[585] Published in German at Lübeck in 1854 as Das heroische Zeitalter der Nordisch-Germanischen Völker und die Wikinger-Züge.
[586] Maurer had long been a student of Icelandic lore, and his Isländische Volkssagen der Gegenwart gesammelt und verdeutscht (Leipzig, 1860) is greatly illustrative of the early north. Conybeare (Place of Iceland in the History of European Institutions, preface) says: “To any one writing on Iceland the elaborate works of the learned Maurer afford at once a help and difficulty: a help in so far as they shed the fullest light upon the subjects; a difficulty in that their painstaking completeness has brought together well-nigh everything that can be said.”
[587] What is known as the Kristni Saga gives an account of this change. Cf. Eugène Beauvois, Origines et fondation du plus ancien évêché du nouveau monde. Le diocèse de Gardhs en Grœnland, 986-1126 (Paris, 1878), an extract from the Mémoires de la Soc. d’Histoire, etc., de Beaune; C. A. V. Conybeare’s Place of Iceland in the history of European institutions (1877); Maurer’s Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte des germanischen Nordens; Wheaton’s Northmen; Worsaae’s Danes and Norwegians in England, p. 332; Jacob Rudolph Keyser’s Private Life of the Old Northmen, as translated by M. R. Barnard (London, 1868), and his Religion of the Northmen, as translated by B. Pennock (N. Y., 1854); Quarterly Review, January, 1862; and references in McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia, under Iceland.
[588] Such are the Swedish work of A. M. Strinhold, known in the German of E. F. Frisch as Wikingzüge, Staatsverfassung und Sitten der alten Scandinaver (Hamburg, 1839-41).
A summarized statement of life in Iceland in the early days is held to be well made out in Hans O. H. Hildebrand’s Lifvet þå Island under Sagotiden (Stockholm, 1867), and in A. E. Holmberg’s Nordbon under Hednatiden (Stockholm). J. A. Worsaae published his Vorgeschichte des Nordens at Hamburg in 1878. It was improved in a Danish edition in 1880, and from this H. F. Morland Simpson made the Prehistory of the North, based on contemporary materials (London, 1886), with a memoir of Worsaae (d. 1885), the foremost scholar in this northern lore.