[589] This book is recognized as one of the best commentaries and most informing books on Icelandic history, and this writer’s introduction to Gudbrand Vigfússon’s Icelandic-English Dictionary (3 vols., Cambridge, Eng., 1869, 1870, 1874) is of scholarly importance.
[590] The millennial celebration of the settlement of Iceland in 1874 gave occasion to a variety of books and papers, more or less suggestive of the early days, like Samuel Kneeland’s American in Iceland (Boston. 1876); but the enumeration of this essentially descriptive literature need not be undertaken here.
[591] Antiquitates Americanæ, pp. 1-76, with an account of the Greenland MSS. (p. 255). Müller’s Sagenbibliothek. Arngrimur Jónsson’s Grönlandia (Iceland, 1688). A fac-simile of the title is in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii., no. 1356. A translation by Rev. J. Sephton is in the Proc. Lit. and Philos. Soc. of Liverpool, vol. xxxiv. 183, and separately, Liverpool, 1880. There is a paper in the Jahresbericht der geographischen Gesellschaft in München für 1885 (Munich, 1886), p. 71, by Oskar Brenner, on “Grönland im Mittelalter nach einer altnorwegischen Quelle.”
Some of the earliest references are: Christopherson Claus’ Den Grölandske Chronica (Copenhagen, 1608), noticed in the Carter-Brown Catalogue, ii., no. 64. Gerald de Veer’s True and perfect description of three voyages speaks in its title (Carter-Brown, ii. 38) of “the countrie lying under 80 degrees, which is thought to be Greenland, where never man had been before.” Antoine de la Sale wrote between 1438 and 1447 a curious book, printed in 1527 as La Salade, in which he refers to Iceland and Greenland (Gronnellont), where white bears abound (Harrisse, Bib. Am. Vet., no. 140).
[592] This book is now rare. Dufossé prices it at 50 francs; F. S. Ellis,—London. 1884, at £5.5.0. Before Torfæus, probably the best known book was Isaac de la Peyrère’s Relation du Groenland (Paris, 1647). It is one of the earliest books to give an account of the Eskimos. It was again printed in 1674 in Recueil de Voyages du Nord. A Dutch edition at Amsterdam in 1678 (Nauwkenrige Beschrijvingh van Groenland) was considerably enlarged with other matter, and this edition was the basis of the German version published at Nuremberg, 1679. Peyrère’s description will be found in English in a volume published by the Hakluyt Society in 1855, where it is accompanied by two maps of the early part of the seventeenth century. Cf. Carter-Brown, ii., no. 1192, note; Sabin, x. p. 70.
[593] Pilling (Eskimo Bibliog., p. 20) gives the most careful account of editions. Cf. Sabin, v. 66. A Dutch translation at Haarlem in 1767 was provided with better and larger maps than the original issue; and this version was again brought out with a changed title in 1786. There was a Swedish ed. at Stockholm in 1769, and a reprint of the original German at Leipzig in 1770, and it is included in the Bibliothek der neuesten Reisebeschreibungen (Frankfort, 1779-1797), vol. xx. Cf. Carter-Brown, ii., nos. 1443, 1576, 1577, 1671, 1728.
[594] This constitutes in 3 vols. a sort of supplement to the Antiquitates Americanæ, Cf. Dublin Review, xxvii. 35; Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog. de Paris, 3d ser., vol. vi., and a synopsis of the Mindesmæker in The Sacristy, Feb. 1, 1871 (London).
[595] The principal ruin is that of a church, and it will be found represented in the Antiquitates Americanæ, and again by Nordenskjöld, Steenstrup, J. T. Smith (Discovery of America, etc.), Horsford; and, not to name more, in Hayes’s Land of Desolation (and in the French version in Tour du Monde, xxvi.).
[596] Rafn in his Americas arctiske landes Gamle Geographie efter de Nordiske Oldskrifter (Copenhagen, 1845) gives the seals of some of the Greenland bishops, various plans of the different ruins, a view of the Katortok church with its surroundings, engraving of the different runic inscriptions, and a map of the Julianehaab district.
[597] This tendency of the Scandinavian writers is recognized among themselves. Horn (Anderson’s translation, 324) ascribes it to “an unbridled fancy and want of critical method rather than to any wilful perversion of historical truth. This tendency owed its origin to an intense patriotism, a leading trait in the Swedish character, which on this very account was well-nigh incorrigible.”