were first printed in Swedish at Upsala, in 1777, in which form they were reviewed in the Monthly Review (Appendix on Foreign Literature, 1778). One of them had previously appeared in an Upsala newspaper in 1773. In 1779 they were published in a German translation, with additions, at Upsala and Leipzig. The English translation of 1780 was reviewed in great detail by the Monthly Review for September, 1780, and reprinted in the first volume of John Pinkerton's General Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1808). The Introduction to this book contains "a very curious and complete catalogue" (one hundred and twenty titles) of "all the publications that have appeared, to treat either at large of Iceland, or examine some of its particular objects." The fourteenth letter, which the reviewer in 1780 found "particularly curious and instructive," treats "Of the Icelandic Literature"; the sixteenth, “Of the Remains of Antiquity in Iceland"; the seventeenth, "Of the Icelandic Poetry "; the twenty-third is the Chevalier Ihre's letter to Von Troil "Concerning the Edda," a discussion of an ancient manuscript.2 Bergman's Curious Observations and Chemical Examination of the Lava and other Substances produced on the Island. With a new Map of the Island, and a Representation of the remarkable Boiling Fountain called by the Inhabitants GEYSER. London, MDCCLXXX. 1 Johan Ihre (b. 1707, d. 1780) succeeded to the professorship held by Scheffer at the University in Upsala. His first letter on the Edda (not the one printed by Von Troil) appeared at Upsala in 1772. His Glossarium Suio-gothicum (1769) was well known, and his treatise De Runarum Patria (1770) is cited as late as 1824 in a Dissertation on a Runic Ring read that year before the London Society of Antiquaries by Francis Douce (see Archæologia, XXI, 129, n.). 2 Horace Walpole knew Von Troil's volume. In a letter to Mason written April 25, 1780, he makes fun of an illustration (pp. 201 f.) of the skaldic kenning: "I will transcribe a Riddle, not with all its mysteries, for then it would be inexplicable. The ghosts of Odin and Gray must pardon my speaking so irreverently of what they alone could expound. This fragment I believe genuine, for the editor has not made it dance to Macpherson's hornpipe, nor pretends that there are clergymen living in the Highlands who have been able to say it by heart for these thousand years. This is an Icelandic stanza, the English of which, says Dr. Uno Von Troil, is, I hang the round beaten gaping snake on the end of the bridge of the mountain bird at the gallows of Odin's shield.' The sense of this nonsense is, a Mr. Ihre affirms, 'I put a ring on my finger.' I do not lessen the enigma by giving you the solution, for now you are to make out how that can be. Sir George Steuart Mackenzie's Travels in the Island of Iceland, during the Summer of the Year MDCCCX (Edinburgh, 1811; 2d ed., 1812) was another important book. The beginning of Mackenzie's Preface is significant: The Island of Iceland is but little distant from that of Britain: it has long been known to contain many extraordinary natural phenomena; and yet very few have been induced to visit it, either from private curiosity, or from the more general views of science. The first British travellers who attempted to explore the country, probably thought their observations too uninteresting to be communicated to the public; and even the Letters of Von Troil, who accompanied them, though in many respects valuable, were, perhaps, chiefly so, by awakening the curiosity of science to that neglected, but remarkable country. Mackenzie's book contains chapters on Agriculture, Commerce, Government, Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, and other matters of interest to scientists, but there are also a Preliminary Dissertation on the History and Literature of Iceland, a chapter on the Present State of Education and Literature,2 and an Appendix on Miscellaneous Articles connected with History and Literature, all by Henry Holland, M.D. Dr. Holland's learned footnotes show him to have been well read in this subject. Mackenzie's book was reviewed in the Monthly Review for June, 1812. 8 Finally, we have William Jackson Hooker's Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809 (London, 1811; 2d ed., 1813), a book inspired by Von Troil's Letters. In his sketch of Icelandic mythology Hooker makes free use of the Northern Antiquities; he quotes from Gray's Descent of Odin, and cites Percy's Five Pieces and Dr. Holland's Dissertation in Mackenzie's Travels. Hooker's Journal was reviewed in the Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1813. If you can, you deserve to be poet laureate of Hecla" (Walpole's Letters, ed. Cunningham, VII, 358). Southey also read Von Troil; see Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, London, 1856, II, 242 f., where he also cites Horrebow, Olafsen and Povelsen, and Molesworth. 1 Pp. 3-70. 2 Pp. 309-335. 8 This contains, among other things, a translation into modern Icelandic of a part of Pope's Essay on Man. IV. SCANDINAVIAN HISTORY It is not worth while even to mention the tolerably large number of works dealing with the history of the Scandinavian countries published during the period we are considering, but the three or four such books most frequently cited (setting aside Mallet) in the latter half of the eighteenth century deserve at least to be named. Vertot's Histoire des Révolutions de Suède, which was first published at Paris in 1695 and ran through five editions, was still read late in the eighteenth century.1 John Egede, who established the Danish missions in Greenland, wrote in Danish, in 1729, a history of Greenland which went through several editions and was translated into German, French, Dutch, and (1745) English. The book is cited by Percy,2 Dr. Holland, and other English writers. Another history of Greenland, written by David Cranz in German and published at Barby in 1765, was translated into English in 1767, and reviewed in the Critical Review for January of that year. The book is mentioned by Southey, Home," and Coleridge." 4 Robert Molesworth, English envoy to the Danish court in the reign of William III, wrote, shortly after his return to England, an Account of Denmark as it was in the year 1692, which passed through three editions in the year of publication (1694), and was translated into other languages. The book was a sweeping denunciation of the Danish system of government and public instruction, and it occasioned a good deal of controversy. Two refutations of Molesworth appeared in English in this same year (1694), one by Dr. William King (entitled Animadversions on a Pretended Account of Denmark, 1 See Walpole's Letters, ed. Cunningham, II, 9; IV, 107; IX, 232; also Edw. Jerningham's Poems, 7th ed., Philadelphia, n.d., p. 33. 2 Northern Antiquities, I, 273 f. 8 Mackenzie's Travels, p. 43. 6 The Destiny of Nations, in Poetical and Dramatic Works, London, 1880, I, 195, n. etc.), the other, by "J. C.," entitled Denmark Vindicated. Being an Answer to a late Treatise called An Account of Denmark, etc. King's book shows familiarity with the names, at any rate, of Scandinavian antiquaries. Among the "historians" of Denmark he mentions 2 Wormius, Petrus Resenius, and "the lately deceased young gentleman, Thomas Bartholinus." CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION THE reader of the foregoing pages can hardly fail to be impressed by the fact that whatever the English people at large came to know in the eighteenth century about Odin and Valhalla and the Eddas and the sagas was almost entirely due to the efforts of writers who could read Norse literature only in translation. Up to the nineteenth century no Englishman, indeed, with the possible exception of Hickes, seems to have had a thorough acquaintance with the Old Norse language. In an age when it was thought necessary to argue for the importance to English scholarship of a knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, it is scarcely to be expected that much enthusiasm would be shown for the study of the remoter Germanic languages. Sir Henry Spelman may have had some acquaintance with Norse. Francis Junius certainly had. William Nicolson confesses in a letter to Thomas Tanner, apropos of a controversy with "Mr. Worms," 1 Reprinted in The Original Works of William King, edited by John Nichols, London, 1776, I, 35 f. 2 P. 125. Hickes defends the study of Anglo-Saxon in the preface to his Anglo-Saxon grammar; so does Elizabeth Elstob in The Rudiments of Grammar for the EnglishSaxon tongue, first given in English; with an Apology for the study of Northern Antiquities, London, 1715. In a letter to Joseph Ames, George Ballard writes (June 29, 1737) of the value of Anglo-Saxon and complains of the bigotry of those who decry it (see Nichols's Illustrations, IV, 211; and cf. his Anecdotes, IV, 123). 4 See Letters on Various Subjects to and from William Nicolson, London, 1809, I, 59, and cf. p. 10, above. ... that he has "little skill. . . in the Islandic," although he is "very confident" that Worm "less understood what he quotes from Snorro" than either Bartholin or himself. "The words seinar bokar," Nicolson adds with some assurance, "which he lays a stress upon as if they were plural, are certainly of the singular number." Edward Lye, we know, was able to collate Percy's translations of Five Pieces of Runic Poetry with the Norse originals, but he allowed several gross errors made by the compiler of Percy's Latin sources to pass uncorrected. Edward Thwaites could read Anglo-Saxon, and had a hand in compiling Hickes's Thesaurus, but I know of no positive evidence that he could make use of Norse texts. The Elstobs undoubtedly knew something of Norse. Elizabeth Elstob wrote of her brother, "Nor was he ignorant of the Oriental languages, as well as the Septentrional." Norse would be the likeliest Northern language, after Anglo-Saxon, to satisfy the tastes of William Elstob. We have pretty good evidence that Dr. White Kennet studied Norse under Hickes. Whether specialists like William Clarke, author of a work on The Connexion of the Roman, Saxon and English Coins (London, 1767), who wrote to Bowyer criticising Hickes's treatment of Scandinavian, Saxon, and Welsh legal usages, would take the trouble to investigate original documents is a matter of doubt. The Rev. Thomas Dunham Whitaker, editor of Piers Plowman (1813) had, according to Nichols, "an intimate acquaintance with the AngloSaxon and Gothic dialects on which our own is chiefly founded." "Gothic" is as likely to mean "Norse," in this connection, as anything else." 1 4 8 1 Nichols's Illustrations, IV, 212; cf. his Anecdotes, IV, 115. 2 2 Nichols notes (Anecdotes, IV, 113) that “among Ballard's MS. Letters [in the Bodleian], Vol. XIII, No. 29, is a letter to Dr. Arthur Charlett from Mr. Elstob, dated Aug. 26, 1700, containing some Runic, Saxon, and Latin Poetry, ‘in obitum serenissimi Principis Wilhelmi Ducis Glocestrensis."" 8 See Nichols's Anecdotes, II, 111 ff. Illustrations, IV, 872. 5 The relations between the various Germanic languages were of course ill understood at this period. The Critical Review for February, 1763, calls Norse "the original Gothic language." Johnstone, in his preface to Olave (1780), writes of Norse as "the most pure and original dialect of the Teutonic." Attention has already been called to the constant confusion of the terms "Gothic" and "Celtic." |