[627] Orig. ed., iii. 313; last revision, ii. 132.
[628] This society, Kongelige Nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab, since 1825, has been issuing works and periodicals illustrating all departments of Scandinavian archæology (cf. Webb, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., viii. 177), and has gathered cabinets and museums, sections of which are devoted to American subjects. C. C. Rafn’s Cabinet d’antiquités Américaines à Copenhague (Copenhagen, 1858); Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, xiv. 316; Slafter’s introd. to his Voyages of the Northmen.
[629] Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., viii. 81; Am. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1865; N. E. Hist. Geneal. Reg., 1865, p. 273; To-day, ii. 176.
[630] Professor Willard Fiske has paid particular attention to the early forms of the Danish in the Icelandic literature. In 1885 the British Museum issued a Catalogue of the books printed in Iceland from a.d. 1578 to 1880 in the library of the British Museum. In 1886 Mr. Fiske privately printed at Florence Bibliographical Notices, i.: Books printed in Iceland, 1578-1844, a supplement to the British Museum Catalogue, which enumerates 139 titles with full bibliographical detail and an index. He refers also to the principal bibliographical authorities. Laing’s introduction to the Heimskringla gives a survey.
[631] Cf. list of their several issues in Scudder’s Catal. of Scient. Serials, nos. 640, 654, and the Rafn bibliography in Sabin, xvi. nos. 67,466-67,486. In addition to its Danish publications, the chief of which interesting to the American archæologist being the Antiquarisk Tidsskrift (1845-1864), sometimes known as the Revue Archéologique et Bulletin, the society, under its more familiar name of Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, has issued its Mémoires, the first series running from 1836 to 1860, in 4 vols., and the second beginning in 1866. These contain numerous papers involving the discussion of the Northmen voyages, including a condensed narrative by Rafn, “Mémoire sur la découverte de l’Amérique au 10e siècle,” which was enlarged and frequently issued separately in French and other languages (1838-1843), and is sometimes found in English as a Supplement to the Antiquitates Americanæ, and was issued in New York (1838) as America discovered in the tenth century. In this form (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., viii. 187) it was widely used here and in Europe to call attention to Rafn’s folio, Antiquitates Americanæ.
The Mémoires also contained another paper by Rafn, Aperçu de l’ancienne géographie des régions arctiques de l’Amérique, selon les rapports contenus dans les Sagas du Nord (Copenhagen, 1847), which also concerns the Vinland voyages, and is repeated in the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (1849), i. 277.
[632] Antiqvitates Americanæ sive scriptores septentrionales rerum ante-Columbianarum in America. Samling af de i nordens oldskrifter indeholdte efterretninger om de gamle nordboers opdagelsesreiser til America fra det 10de til det 14de aarhundrede. Edidit Societas regia antiquariorum Septentrionalium (Hafniæ, 1837). Contents: Præfatio.—Conspectus codicum membraneorum, in quibus terrarum Americanarum mentio fit.—America discovered by the Scandinavians in the tenth century. (An abstract of the historical evidence contained in this work.)—Pættir af Eireki Rauda ok Grænlendingum.—Saga Porfinns Karlsefnis ok Snorra Porbrandssonar.—Breviores relationes: De inhabitatione Islandiæ; De inhabitatione Grœnlandiæ; De Ario Maris filio; De Björne Breidvikensium athleta; De Gudleivo Gudlœgi filio; Excerpta ex annalibus Islandorum; Die mansione Grœnlandorum in locis Borealibus; Excerpta e geographicis scriptis veterum Islandorum; Carmen Færöicum, in quo Vinlandiæ mentio fit; Adami Bremensis Relatio de Vinlandia; Descriptio quorumdam monumentorum Europæorum, quæ in oris Grönlandiæ ocidentalibus reperta et detecta sunt; Descriptio vetusti monumenti in regione Massachusetts reperti; Descriptio vetustorum quorundam monumentorum in Rhode Island.—Annotationes geographicæ; Islandia et Grönlandia; Indagatio Arctoarum Americæ regionum.—Indagatio Orientalium Americæ regionum.—Addenda et emendanda.—Indexes. The larger works are in Icelandic, Danish, and Latin.
Cf. also his Antiquités Américaines d’après les monuments historiques des Islandais et des anciens Scandinaves (Copenhagen, 1845). An abstract of the evidence is given in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (viii. 114), and it is upon this that H. H. Bancroft depends in his Native Races (v. 106). Cf. also Ibid. v. 115-116; and his Cent. America, i. 74. L. Dussieux in his Les Grands Faits de l’Histoire de la Géographie (Paris, 1882; vol. i. 147, 165) follows Rafn and Malte-Brun. So does Brasseur de Bourbourg in his Hist. de Nations Civilisées, i. 18; and Bachiller y Morales in his Antigüedades Americanas (Havana, 1845).
Great efforts were made by Rafn and his friends to get reviews of his folio in American periodicals; and he relied in this matter upon Dr. Webb and others, with whom he had been in correspondence in working up his geographical details (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ii. 97, 107; viii. 189, etc.), and so late as 1852 he drafted in English a new synopsis of the evidence, and sent it over for distribution in the United States (Ibid. ii. 500; New Jersey Hist. Soc. Proc., vi.; N. E. Hist. Geneal. Reg., 1853, p. 13). So far as weight of character went, there was a plenty of it in his reviewers: Edward Everett in the No. Amer. Rev., Jan., 1838; Alexander Everett in the U. S. Magazine and Democratic Review (1838); George Folsom in the N. Y. Review (1838); H. R. Schoolcraft in the Amer. Biblical Repository (1839). Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., viii. 182-3; Poole’s Index, 28, 928.
[633] Bohn’s ed., English transl., ii. 603; Lond. ed., 1849, ii. 233-36. Humboldt expresses the opinion that Columbus, during his visit to Iceland, got no knowledge of the stories, so little an impression had they made on the public mind (Cosmos, Bohn, ii. 611), and that the enemies of Columbus in his famous lawsuit, when every effort was made to discredit his enterprise, did not instance his Iceland experience, should be held to indicate that no one in southern Europe believed in any such prompting at that time. Wheaton and Prescott (Ferdinand and Isabella, orig. ed., ii. 118, 131) hold similar opinions. (Cf. Vol. II. p. 33.) Dr. Webb says that Irving held back from accepting the stories of the saga, for fear that they could be used to detract from Columbus’ fame. Rafn and his immediate sympathizers did not fail to make the most of the supposition that Columbus had in some way profited by his Iceland experience. Laing thinks Columbus must have heard of the voyages, and De Costa (Columbus and the Geographers of the North) thinks that the bruit of the Northmen voyages extended sufficiently over Europe to render it unlikely that it escaped the ears of Columbus. Cf. further an appendix in Irving’s Columbus, and Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, Bohn’s ed., 267, in refutation of the conclusions of Finn Magnusen in the Nordisk Tidsskrift. It has been left for the unwise and overtopped advocates of a later day, like Goodrich and Marie A. Brown, to go beyond reason in an indiscriminate denunciation of the Genoese. The latter writer, in her Icelandic Discoverers of America (Boston, 1888), rambles over the subject in a jejune way, and easily falls into errors, while she pursues her main purpose of exposing what she fancies to be a deep-laid scheme of the Pope and the Catholic Church to conceal the merits of the Northmen and to capture the sympathies of Americans in honoring the memory of Columbus in 1892. It is simply a reactionary craze from the overdone raptures of the school of Roselly de Lorgues and the other advocates of the canonization of Columbus, in Catholic Europe.