the practice of medicine.1 Bartholin's Antiquitatum Danicarum de Causis Contemptæ a Danis adhuc gentilibus Mortis libri tres appeared at Copenhagen in 1689. The work is a scholarly attempt to account for the indifference toward death displayed by the old Norsemen. In the course of his treatise Bartholin makes a great number of extracts from Norse poems and sagas, many of them never before printed. The book was indispensable to any Englishman of the eighteenth century who had the least curiosity with regard to Norse literature, and we shall find it cited very often in the following pages.2 One of the most famous archeologists of his time was the Icelander Thormod Torfason, usually cited as Torfæus, who was employed by Frederick III of Denmark to collect and translate old Norse manuscripts. Later he became royal historiographer of Norway, where his best-known works were written: De Rebus Gestis Færeyensium (Copenhagen, 1695); Historia Orcadum (Copenhagen, 1697); Historia Vinlandia (Copenhagen, 1705); Historia Rerum Norvegicarum, 4 vols. (Copenhagen, 1711).

A learned Swede, Johan Peringskjöld, had the honor of publishing the first complete edition of Snorri's Heimskringla, in 1697–1700, at Stockholm. This was in Norse, Swedish, and Latin. Other

1 Albert Bartholin (1620-1663) was the author of a work called De Scriptis Danorum, published posthumously at Copenhagen in 1666 by his brother, the elder Thomas Bartholin, and reprinted in Johannes Möller's Bibliotheca Septentrionis Eruditi, Leipzig, 1699.

2 Professor Kittredge calls my attention to the fact that Montesquieu cites Bartholin in L'Esprit des Lois, liv. xxiv, ch. 19, a book much read by Englishmen. It is odd to find the name Bartholin turning up in Tristram Shandy (II, xix): "As for that certain, very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milaneze physician affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered..." This Bartholin, however, was the elder Thomas, grandfather of the author of the Antiquitates Danica. The letter in question was one of two addressed to the elder Thomas Bartholin by Giuseppe Francesco Borri, a medical charlatan of the seventeenth century: Epistolæ duæ ad Th. Bartholinum de ortu cerebri et usu medico; necnon de artificio oculorum humores restituendi, Copenhagen, 1669. See J. C. Adelung, Gesch. der menschlichen Narrheit, Leipzig, 1785, I, 77 ff.

8 Another edition well known in the eighteenth century was that of Schöning and Thorlacius, 3 vols., Copenhagen, 1777-1783, afterwards extended by the addition of three more volumes, 1813-1826.

works of Peringskjöld's that deserve mention are his edition (17001705) of the Scondia Illustrata of the celebrated Swedish poet and historian, Johan Messenius; his Historia Hialmari Regis Biarmlandiæ atque Thulemarkiæ (1700); and his Monumenta Sveo-Gothorum (1710-1719).

The Antiquitates selectæ Septentrionales et Celticæ (Hannover, 1720), by Johann Georg Keysler, had a wide circulation in Europe.1 A volume of Travels by the same author was translated into English (2d ed., 1756-1757).

Eric Julius Biörner's Nordiska Kampa Dater (Stockholm, 1737) is another important book. This contained Norse, Swedish, and Latin versions of no less than fifteen ancient manuscripts, among them Hrolf Kraki's saga, the Friðþjófs Saga and the saga of Ragnar Lodbrok.

Some of the historical works of Eric Pontoppidan, a Norwegian theologian, were known in England, particularly his Gesta et Vestigia Danorum extra Daniam (3 vols., Leipzig and Copenhagen, 17401741). Another book by this author, printed at Copenhagen in 1752-1754, was translated into English by A. Linde and published at London in 1755 under the title The Natural History of Norway. Of the other historians and antiquaries of less importance whose works are cited in the margins of old books on Scandinavian subjects, it may be worth while to mention Johan Isaksen Pontanus, whose Rerum Danicarum Historia appeared at Amsterdam in 1631; Philipp Cluver, a native of Dantzic, whose Germania Antiquæ libri tres came out in 1616; and Marc Boxhorn, a Dutch scholar, author of a Historia Universalis which appeared at Leyden in 1650 and was reprinted with additions by Otto Mencke at Leipzig in 1675.*

1 For a discussion of Keysler see Batka, Euphorion, Bd. III, Zweites Ergänzungsheft, pp. 6 ff.

2 Professor Kittredge points out that this is the "book on the 'exploits des rois et des héros du Nord"" cited by Mallet and mentioned by Phelps, English Romantic Movement, p. 162, n.

8 See Büsching's New System of Geography, London, 1762, I, ix.

4 Treatises on the general subject of mythology sometimes furnished scraps of information about the Scandinavian gods. Among these were Schedius's famous dissertation De Dis Germanis, Amsterdam, 1648, which was known by Englishmen

In England, as I have said, until well after the middle of the eighteenth century these erudite works were hardly known, even by name, except to a few antiquaries and the limited number of readers for whom they wrote. Some of these English scholars, however, were men of enough note in their day to deserve attention here. One of the earliest was Richard Rowland or Rowlands, better known as Richard Verstegan or Verstegen, whose Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities concerning the most noble and renowned English Nation appeared at Antwerp in 1605 and afterwards in various editions at London. Since this seems to have been the first serious attempt upon the part of any Englishman to investigate Germanic origins, the author's reasons for publishing his book, as set forth in the preface, are worth quoting. "The thing that first moued mee to take some paines in this studie," he says, "was, the verie naturall affection which generally is in all men' to here of the worthinesse of their Ancestors, which they should indeed be as desirous to imitate, as delighted to vnderstand. Secondarily was I hereunto moued; by seeing how diuers of diuers nations

of no greater pretension to scholarship than Dr. Frank Sayers; G. J. Voss's De Theologia Gentili et Physiologia Christiana, new ed., Amsterdam, 1668 (see pp. 138-144); Matthæi Brouërii de Niedek... de Populorum Veterum ac Recentiorum Adorationibus Dissertatio, Amsterdam, 1713 (see p. 76); J. G. Frick's De Druidis Occidentalium Populorum Philosophis, Ulm, 1731 (see pp. 44, 45, and cf. Gray's Works, ed. Gosse, II. 293 f.); Banier's Mythology and Fables of the Ancients, Translated from the original French, London, 1739-1740 (see II, 316).

Odin's repute as a magician brought his name, and the names of some of his associates, into several of the learned lucubrations on magic and demonology written in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. See, for example, Johann Wier, De Præstigiis Dæmonum, Basel, 1583 (lib. i, col. 34; lib. iii, col. 338); Jean Bodin, De la Démonomanie des Sorciers, Paris, 1587 (pp. 101 recto, 109 verso, 247 recto); Francisco Torreblanca, Dæmonologia, Moguntiæ, 1623; Gottfr. Chr. Rothius, De Imagunculis Germanorum Magicis quas Alrunas vocant Commentatio, Helmstadii, 1737 (Hickes and Wanley are cited on p. 71); Const. Fr. De Cauz, De Cultibus Magicis, Vindobonæ, 1767 (pp. 4, 14, 61, 104, 151). In this connection may be mentioned, too, a passage in Cockayne's Leechdoms, London, 1866, III, 34, "a genam Woden VIIII. wuldortanas, sloh ða ða næddran Sæt heo on VIIII. to fleah" (see Chadwick, The Cult of Odin, London, 1899, p. 29). Johann Schilter's Glossarium ad Scriptores Lingua Francicæ et Alemannica Veteris, Ulm, 1728, and Wachter's Glossarium Germanicum, Leipzig, 1737, explain words like alruna and Woden, and make some allusions to the Scandinavian deities.

did labour to reuiue the old honour and glorie of their owne beginnings and ancestors, and how in so doing they shewed themselues the most kind louers of their naturall friends and countriemen : observing there withall how diuerse of our English writers haue beene as laborious and serious in their discourses of the Antiquitie of the Brittans as if they properly appertained vnto Englishmen, which in no wise they doe or can doe, for that their offsprings and descents are wholly different. . . . Whereby and through the lacke of due distinction betweene the two nations. . . our true originall and honorable Antiquitie lieth inuolued and obscured, and wee remaining ignorant of our owne true ancestors, vnderstand our descent otherwise then it is, deeming it enough for vs to heare that Eneas and his Troians the supposed ancestors of King Brute and his Brittans are largely discoursed of.”1

With this end in view Verstegan proceeds to discourse "Of the originall of Nations, and conseqvently of that nation, from which Englishmen are vndoubtedly descended" (i.e. of the "Germane race," which he traces back to the confusion of tongues at the building of the tower of Babel), and "Of the antient manner of liuing of our Saxon Ancestors. Of the Idolls they adored while they were Pagans : and how they grew to bee of greatest name and habitation of any other people of Germanie" (in which chapter we learn among other things of "The Idoll Tuysco," "The Idoll Woden," who is pictured in full mediæval armor, "The Idoll Thor," and "The Idoll Friga "). Other chapters tell of the migration of the Saxons into England, of the Danish and Norman invasions, and the last presents "an explanation of sundrie our most ancient Saxon words."

Henry Spelman, author of a Glossarium Archaiologicum, the first part of which appeared in 1626, and the second, edited by Dugdale, in 1664, is of interest to us because of his acquaintance with Ole Worm and, through Worm, with Arngrim Jonsson. In the course of their correspondence Worm consulted Spelman with regard to various archæological matters and sent him a copy of his book on runes.2

1 Ed. London, 1628.

Havniæ, 1751,

2 See Olai Wormii et ad eum Doctorum Virorum Epistolæ . 2 vols., I, 423-457. In a letter written in May, 1638 (I, 447), Worm announces

Hickes's friend, William Nicolson, successively Bishop of Carlisle and of Derry, and Archbishop of Cashel, was sent, we are told,1 in 1678 "by Sir Joseph Williamson, then Secretary of State, to Leipsic, in order to get acquaintance with the High Dutch and other Septentrional languages." In 1680 he "published an account of the state of the kingdoms of Poland, Denmark, and Norway, as also of Iceland, in the first volume of the English Atlas." In 1705 he wrote to Humphrey Wanley: "Next to what concerns the preservation of our Established Religion and Government, peace here and salvation hereafter, I know nothing that hath greater share in my thoughts and desires than the promotion of Septentrional Learning." Dr. Nicolson's immediate interest was in Anglo-Saxon antiquities, but his correspondence shows that he was familiar to some extent with Old Norse, and that he was in communication with various Scandinavian antiquaries, among them a member of the Worm family, and Johan Peringskjöld.

8

Francis Junius (François Du Jon), though a German by birth, may not improperly be considered here. In the course of his investigations of Anglo-Saxon and Gothic literature he became interested in Norse. To Junius's edition of the Anglo-Saxon and Gothic gospels, published at Dort in 1665, are appended specimens of various alphabets, among them an Alphabetum Runicum, printed from movable type, in connection with which he reproduces a Rune-song borrowed

4

that he has sent fifty copies of his Literatura Runica to Spelman's bookseller, for which he desires English books in exchange. Some account of this correspondence is given in Frederick Metcalfe's The Englishman and the Scandinavian, London, 1880, pp. 4-13.

1 See the Brief Memoirs prefixed to Letters on Various Subjects ... to and from William Nicolson, D.D., edited by John Nichols, 2 vols., London, 1809.

2 Letters, II, 650. Cf. I, 59, 63, 102, 159, 255; II, 534.

8 Professor Cook conjectures, plausibly, that the "Mr. Worms" mentioned in the Letters, I, 59, is Christian Worm, whom he calls the nephew of Ole Worm (Publ. of the Mod. Lang. Assoc., XVII, 368 f.). Christian Worm, however, appears to have been the grandson of the famous antiquary. See Nyerup and Kraft, and cf. the preface to Ole Worm's correspondence, p. 3. Nicolson has considerable to say about Scandinavian antiquities in his English Historical Library (ed. of 1736, pp. 50 ff.) and his Irish Historical Library (ed. of 1736, pp. vi f., x f.).

4 Pp. 23 ff. Vigfusson and Powell print this song from Worm's text, with corrections, in C.P.B., II, 369 f.