"Icelandic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will, in the course of his very useful labours, ultimately find it not only specious but correct. Meanwhile, I submit to his consideration, that beside the analogy of the Gothic sprauto, we have in Icelandic spretta, imperf. spratt, "subito movere, repente salire, emicare;" and sprettr, "cursus citatus," and I do think these ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... pious, mild eyes that conjured the spirit out of the dead letters. Here is the celebrated Codex Argentius, the translation of the "Four Evangelists."[Q] Gold and silver letters glisten from the red parchment leaves. We see ancient Icelandic manuscripts, from de la Gardie's refined French saloon, and Thauberg's Japanese manuscripts. By merely looking at these books, their bindings and names, one at last becomes, as it were, quite worm-eaten in spirit, and longs to be out in the free air—and we are there; ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... instance the resemblance in sound between the words undoubtedly conduced to an union. Gibberish may have come from the Gipsy, and at the same time owe something to gabble, jabber, and the old Norse or Icelandic gifra. Lush may owe something to Mr Lushington, something to the earlier English lush, or rosy, and something to the Gipsy and Sanskrit. It is not at all unlikely that the word codger owes, through cadger, a part of its being to kid, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... a merchant of an old and well known Icelandic family, was born near Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, on June 8, 1888. He was graduated twenty-two years later from the College of Reykjavik, where he received honoris causa in literature and language, the first and only time ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban
... one of the most important in Northern Europe, and its members include many of the most distinguished savans of Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It possesses an excellent library, which contains, amongst other things of great value, about 2000 Icelandic manuscripts, very ancient, and written in the old ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... ballad from a milkmaid, in 1771. Mr. Child quotes a verse parallel, preserved in Faroe, and in the Icelandic. There is a similar incident in the cycle of Kullervo, in the Finnish Kalevala. Scott says that similar tragedies are common in Scotch popular poetry; such cases are "Lizzie Wan," and "The King's Dochter, Lady Jean." A sorrow nearly as bitter occurs in the French "Milk White Dove": a brother ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's Reliques appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough by publishing a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation of Icelandic poetry (1763). Not long afterwards Sir William Jones published translations of Oriental poetry. Briefly, as historical, philological, and antiquarian research extended, the man of letters was also ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... other country of Europe are so many books and papers published in proportion to the population as in Iceland. On the average one hundred books are issued annually from Icelandic presses. Several excellent newspapers and ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... genial climate of that country! Among the luxuriant flowers there met with, groves, or forests, if I may so call them, of Monks-hood are frequently seen; the plant of deep, rich blue, and as tall as in our gardens; and this at an elevation where, in Cumberland, Icelandic moss would only be found, or the stony summits be ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... sometimes apt but often crabbed and deformed, as well as an exemplary and homiletic turn of narrative. Other idioms, and perhaps the practice of interspersing verses amid prose (though this also was a twelfth century Icelandic practice), Saxo found in a fifth-century writer, Martianus Capella, the pedantic author of the "De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii" Such models may have saved him from a base mediaeval vocabulary; but they were not worthy of him, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... great scholars make such statements as this it is scarcely surprising that ordinary people should care little for the origins of their own language. The parents of modern English are not Greek but Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian or Icelandic. Both these languages have a literature of the very highest rank, but are little studied in this country. The eighth-century English lyrics are amongst the finest in the language. As for Scandinavian, not every one in England is aware that the Icelanders are, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... English reader. Now the Gyldendal Publishing Company of Copenhagen has undertaken the neglected task of producing English translations of the best Scandinavian fiction, the latest of which is Guest the One-Eyed, by the Icelandic novelist, GUNNAR GUNNARSSON. It is not a particularly powerful narrative, and is marked by the characteristic inconsequence that tends to convert the Scandinavian novel into a melange of family biographies; yet the author has been successful in weaving into his chapters some of the beauty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... common. I could not think Political Economy 'the most exciting thing in the world,' as he used to call it. Nor could I without yawning listen to more than a few lines of Mr. William Morris' interminable smooth Icelandic Sagas, which my friend, pious young socialist that he was, thought 'glorious.' He had begun to write an Icelandic Saga himself, and had already achieved some hundreds of verses. None of these pleased ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the bank or bink (Dan., Baenk; Eng., bench), and eat Aandorn (Eng., afternoon's repast), or, as it is called in Jutland and Fuenen, Onden (dinner.) The chimney (lovver) stands in the room; which name may perhaps be connected with the Scandinavian lyre (Icelandic, ljori)—namely, the smoke-hole in the roof or thatch (thack), out of which, in olden times, before houses had regular chimneys and "lofts" (Dan., Loft; Eng., roof, an upper room), the smoke ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... me, that I have not yet described my hero. I will do it now, as he stands looking down on the glorious landscape;—but in few words. Both in person and character he resembled Harold, the Fair-Hair of Norway, who is described, in the old Icelandic Death-Song of Regner Hairy-Breeches, as "the young chief so proud of his flowing locks; he who spent his mornings among the young maidens; he who loved toconverse with the handsome widows." This was an amiable weakness; and it sometimes led him ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... gives notices of numerous Icelandic voyages to American and other lands of the West. The existence of a great country southwest of Greenland is referred to, not as a matter of speculation merely, but as something perfectly well known. ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... Homer" (Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. iii. pp. 264- 282). Mr. Gardner says that Dasent's plan of the Scandinavian Hall "offers in most respects not likeness, but a striking contrast to the early Greek hall." Mr. Monro, who was not aware of the parallel which I had drawn between the Homeric and Icelandic houses, accepted it on evidence more recent than that of Sir George Dasent. Cf. his Odyssey, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... from the Icelandic says that the mountainlike ruins of this majestic glacier so covered the sea that as far as the eye could reach no open water was discoverable, even from the highest peaks. A monster wall or barrier of ice was built across a considerable stretch of land, too, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Isabella that he could not refuse anything that Mr. Wade asked. Did you know that Howland's lecture, 'What Pellerinism Means,' has been translated into twenty-two languages, and gone into a fifth edition in Icelandic? Why, that reminds me," Miss Fosdick broke off—"I've never heard what became of your queer friend—what was his name?—whom you and Bob Wade accused me of spiriting away after that very lecture. And I've never seen you since ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... honest ballad goes far to excuse him for his lack of gentle demeanor toward the unfaithful editor of the Reliques, pounced down so fiercely upon this definition, contending that, however applicable to Icelandic skalds or Norman trouveres or ProvenASal troubadours, it was altogether too flattering for the vagabond fiddlers of England, roughly trolling over to tavern audiences the ballads borrowed from their betters, that the dismayed bishop altered his last clause to read, ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... fathers and forefathers for a thousand or thousands of years had visited this coast in commerce, and who knew every cape, bay, island, shoal, and harbor from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Tourmente, as well as from the old Icelandic pilots, that Columbus learned of the existence of this Western Continent; and when he sailed from Lisbon on his 'world-seeking voyage,' I make no doubt that he as surely knew, by actual information, of America, as I know that ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... literature of their own country, or at least tongue, very seldom go far outside those limits otherwise than by accident or for works of reference. On the contrary, the English and American collections are cosmopolitan, like those who have formed them. At the British Museum a volume in Icelandic, Chinese, Hawaian, or any other character is welcomed nearly as much as one in the vernacular. In Germany, at all events at Berlin and Vienna, English books of importance are recognised. But at the Bibliotheque in Paris it is not so. The French collect only ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... volume Sir George Dasent's preface has been shortened, and his introduction, which everyone who is interested in old Icelandic life and history should make a point of reading in the original edition, has been considerably abridged. The three appendices, treating of the Vikings, Queen Gunnhillda, and money and currency in the tenth century, have been also exised, and with them ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... end of the room. Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and Finnish and all but Icelandic cafes ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... Junk Whale; the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... undertaken in the leisure time he could spare from his profession. For he was barrister-at-law of Lincoln's Inn, and he was also a landowner in Birmingham (his native city), of property which had belonged to his ancestors in succession for five hundred years. He had made himself a proficient in the Icelandic, Danish, Norse languages, and was learned in the ancient history and politics of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Scandinavia. [Footnote: I quote from the pamphlet on Toulmin ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... Morris learned Icelandic, and his next published works were translations of some of the Icelandic sagas, writings composed from six to nine hundred years ago, and containing a mass of legends, histories and romances finely told in a noble ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... basin of the Mississippi and extending southwards to the borders of Georgia and Alabama, of which the very vigorous and independent inhabitants were and are in many ways a people apart, often cherishing to this day family feuds which are prosecuted in the true spirit of the Icelandic Sagas. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... years ago. There has been no dearth of theories concerning it, however. Blot, who studied it in the Shetland Islands in 1817, thought it due to electrified ferruginous dust, the origin of which he ascribed to Icelandic volcanoes. Much more recently the idea of ferruginous particles has been revived, their presence being ascribed not to volcanoes, but to the meteorites constantly being dissipated in the upper atmosphere. Ferruginous dust, presumably of such origin, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... armed forces; Police, Coast Guard; note - Iceland's defense is provided by the US-manned Icelandic Defense Force (IDF) ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... they reached "Wendelskajn," as Skjagen is called in the old Norwegian and Icelandic writings. Then already Old Skjagen, with the western and eastern town, extended for miles, with sand-hills and arable land, as far as the lighthouse near the "Skjagenzweig." Then, as now, the houses were strewn among the wind-raised ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the word "flippant" back through "flip" and the old Northumbrian present participle ending "an" to the Icelandic "fleipa," which means to prattle—I found this out in a dictionary and copied it down for Lalage. Miss Pettigrew was not, I think, justified in applying the word, supposing that she used it in its strict etymological sense, to Lalage's composition. There ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... that our Suffolk third person singular 'It go, etc.,' is probably right as being the old Icelandic form. Why should the 3rd p. sing. be the only one that varies. And in the auxiliaries May, Shall, Can, etc., there is no change for the 3rd pers. I incline to the Suffolk because ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... of sheep and oxen, as is well known, is proved by the fact that, when the cattle-fines were converted into money-fines, the sheep was rated at ten, and the ox at a hundred asses (Festus, v. -peculatus-, p. 237, comp. pp. 34, 144; Gell. xi. i; Plutarch, Poplicola, ii). By a similar adjustment the Icelandic law makes twelve rams equivalent to a cow; only in this as in other instances the Germanic law has substituted the duodecimal for the older ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... "to build" (O.E. byldan) is apparently connected with O.E. bold, a dwelling, of Scandinavian origin; cf. Danish bol, a farm, Icelandic bol, farm, abode. Skeat traces it eventually to Sanskrit bhu, to be, build meaning "to construct a place in which to be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... the Church made its way to Greenland, another Norwegian colony, which was converted mainly by the instrumentality of an Icelandic missionary, in the first half of the eleventh century; but this ancient Church died out in the fifteenth century. About the same time Christianity spread through the Norwegians to the Orkney, Shetland, and ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... that didn't mean anything, read from either Direction, and then he sized up his Flock with a Dreamy Eye and said: "We cannot more adequately voice the Poetry and Mysticism of our Text than in those familiar Lines of the great Icelandic Poet, Ikon Navrojk: ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... Bergen. Meanwhile, in 1853, M. B. Landstad had published the earliest of his collections of the folkeviser, or national songs, while L. M. Lindeman in the same years (1853-59) was publishing, in installments, the peasant melodies of Norway. Moreover, Ibsen, who read no Icelandic, was studying the ancient sagas in the faithful and vigorous paraphrase of Petersen, and all combined to determine him to make an experiment in a ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... developed, or called into existence, but because it has ceased to exist. In the Latin of the Augustan age as compared with that of the early Republic, we find the s of words like arbos changed into r (arbor). The old High German, also, and the Icelandic, as compared with the Meso-Gothic, does the same. Still the change only affects certain inflectional sy1lables, so that the original s being only partially displaced, retains its place in the language, although it occurs in fewer words. In Australian, where it is wanting at all, it is wanting ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... gregarious, our ants hoard, &c. But when, for convenience, we distribute languages, according to common understanding, into classes originally different, as we choose to consider them, as the Hebrew, the Greek, the Celtic, the Gothic; and these again into genera, or families, as the Icelandic, German, Swedish, Danish, English; and these last into species, or dialects, as English, Scotch, Irish, we then ascribe other meanings to the terms, 'same' and 'different.' In some one of these senses, Barton, and Adair, and Foster, and Brerewood, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in Danish are havre, which suggests O.N. hafrar, goats. Modern Icelandic has hafraroats, but the word is not found in the ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... leader, preceded the Sun in the sign of the Bull, 451-u. Aleph is the Man; Beth, the Woman; One the Principle; Two, the Word, 771-l. Alfader over the Scandinavian Deities, Thor and Odin, 598-u. Alfadir, the Icelandic name for God, but he has twelve names in Asgard, 619-u. Alfarabius, an Arab, cultivated the Hermetic science, 840-l. Alexander of Macedon said, "Nothing is nobler than work.", 40-l. Alexander, result of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... attributed to St. John of Damascus in the following century became amazingly popular, and was soon accepted as true: it was translated from the Greek original not only into Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic, but into every important European language, including even Polish, Bohemian, and Icelandic. Thence it came into the pious historical encyclopaedia of Vincent of Beauvais, and, most important of all, into the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Empire it was the emblem of the "god of rain." There has been much speculation by various authors respecting its origin, as a religious emblem, in Mexico and Central America. It has even been supposed that some of the early Icelandic Christians of the ninth century may have reached the coast of Mexico, and introduced some knowledge of the Christian religion. But the cross was a religious emblem of the greatest antiquity, both in Syria and Egypt, and baptism was a pre-Christian ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... language which the runes were intended to convey. Bishop Gibson, in his additions to Camden's Britannia, described the cross vaguely as "a pillar curiously engraven with some inscription upon it." In a second edition this reads, "with a Danish inscription." Later it was thought to be Icelandic, and it was Haigh who first thought that Caedmon and no other was the author of the runic verses which he deciphered, considering that there was no one living at the period to which he assigned the monument, who could have composed such a poem but the first of all the English nation to express ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... of a collection much larger than I expected to see; and it is well arranged. Of the value of the Icelandic manuscripts I could not form a judgment, though the alphabet of some of them amused me, by showing what immense labour men will submit to, in order to transmit their ideas to posterity. I have sometimes ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... distant Iceland. These sailor-clerics, who settled on the southeast of the island, were spoken of by later Norwegians as "papar." After their departure—they were probably driven away by Norwegian pagans—these Icelandic apostles "left behind them Irish books, bells, and croziers, wherefrom one ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... met, amongst others, the well-known Icelandic poet and diplomatist, Grimur Thomsen, who bore the title of Counsellor of Legation. His compatriots were very proud of him. Icelandic students declared that Grimur possessed twelve dress shirts, three pairs of patent leather boots, and had embraced a marchioness in ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... during the late 9th and 10th centuries A.D., Iceland boasts the world's oldest functioning legislative assembly, the Althing, established in 930. Independent for over 300 years, Iceland was subsequently ruled by Norway and Denmark. Fallout from the Askja volcano of 1875 devastated the Icelandic economy and caused widespread famine. Over the next quarter century, 20% of the island's population emigrated, mostly to Canada and the US. Limited home rule from Denmark was granted in 1874 and complete independence attained in 1944. Literacy, longevity, income, and social ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Boston, so famous in the political and intellectual life of America, stands a monument of bronze which some Scandinavian and historical enthusiasts have raised to the memory of Leif, son of Eric the Red, who, in the first year of the eleventh century, sailed from Greenland where his father, an Icelandic jarl or earl, had founded a settlement. This statue represents the sturdy, well-proportioned figure of a Norse sailor just discovering the new lands with which the Sagas or poetic chronicles of the North connect his name. At the foot ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... at St. Omer, and then went off to get help from Sweyn, of Denmark, and failing that, from Harold Hardraade of Norway. But how he sped there must be read in the words of a cunninger saga-man than this chronicler, even in those of the "Icelandic ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... disposed of in like manner; and then came the modern languages, —German, Spanish,—in which he kept a diary,—French, Italian, and Portuguese. Hebrew and Sanskrit were kept for the years of seventeen and eighteen. In college, Icelandic, Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, and Roumanian were added, with beginnings in Russian. The uses to which he put these languages were not those to which the weary schoolboy puts his few scraps of learning ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... are a clever man. Since the dynamite outrage on the Icelandic six months ago great care has been taken in the supervision of shipments, for the fast steamers and the Oceanic Express Company require that the contents of every package shall be visibly made known to them ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... elderly people really like them better than feelings. She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great many things—about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose, and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins; and—one other thing—oh yes, she thought it ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... with, or consciousness of, the "Beowulf" that we can discover—and they are very few—are such as to favour this date. The only complete parallel to the fable is found in the Icelandic Saga of Grettir, who is a kind of northern Hercules. This hero performs many great feats, but there are three which belong to the supernatural. In one of these he wrestles with a fiend called Glam, and kills him; ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... are very old, and may have been brought to England during the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Parts of the material, such as the dragon-fights, are purely mythical. They relate to Beowa, a superman, of whom many legends were told by Scandinavian minstrels. The Grendel legend, for example, appears in the Icelandic saga of Gretti, who slays the dragon Glam. Other parts of Beowulf are old battle songs; and still others, relating to King Hygelac and his nephew, have some historical foundation. So little is known about ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of Constantinople; and that splendid epoch of their race was just dawning, of which my lamented friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says so well in his preface to Viga Glum's Icelandic Saga, "The Sagas, of which this tale is one, were composed for the men who have left their mark in every corner of Europe; and whose language and laws are at this moment important elements in the speech and institutions of England, America, and Australia. ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Greenland, where she lived for some time universally detested and despised, and died in the utmost misery. The remaining colonists were dispersed, and nothing farther that can be depended on remains on record concerning them. Even the Icelandic colony in Greenland has disappeared, and the eastern coast, on which especially it was settled, has become long inaccessible, in consequence of the immense accumulation of ice in the straits between it and Iceland. To this it may be added, that, in the beginning ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... affected the taste in household art in both England and America. Nevertheless he is best known as a poet. His finest poems are "The Earthly Paradise," a series of Norse legends, "Three Northern Stones," translated from Icelandic poems, and his translations of "The Odyssey." ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year • Various
... by Lye from the Icelandic Tiorn, stagnum, palus) is rendered in our dictionaries as synonymous with Mere or Lake; but it is properly a large Pool or Reservoir in the Mountains, commonly the Feeder of some Mere in the valleys. Tarn Watling and Blellum Tarn, though on lower ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... countries from which the invaders had come. In Frisia in the eighth century we hear of a goddess Hulda, a kind goddess, as her name implies, who sends increase to plants and is a patroness of fishing. A god called Fosete, or Forsete (Forseti in modern Icelandicchairman), identified both with Odin and with Balder, was worshipped in Heligoland; he had a sacred well there, from which water had to be drawn in silence. There are temples, often in the middle of a wood, with priestly incumbents, and rich endowments, both of lands ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... in so many legends, are mere varieties of the mer-maiden, and, according to the Icelandic superstition, they and all fairies were children of Eve, whom she hid away on one occasion when the Lord came to visit her, because they were not washed and presentable! They were, therefore, condemned ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... one trace of any sort of a joke. He would also find that my master drank tea and beer together. Now it happens that about tea I have read nothing either in the sagas or in the bardic cnylynions, but, whilst the landlord had departed to prepare my meal, I recited to the company those Icelandic stanzas which praise the beer of Gunnar, the long-haired son of Harold the Bear. Then, lest the language should be unknown to some of them, I recited my own ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and irritated me a little besides, for I felt that it was in my own vein, and that it was I who had a right to the observation. I immediately quoted an extract from an Icelandic Saga to the effect that dead bees give a stinging quality to the very metheglin of the gods. We exchanged these remarks in crossing the vestibule of the hotel: a carriage was standing there for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... From 'Icelandic Legends': The Merman The Fisherman of Goetur The Magic Scythe The Man-Servant and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... five Scandinavian lands has won something. Norwegian women come with full suffrage rights; Finnish delegates come as representatives of the only nation which has elected women to seats in its Parliament; Sweden and Iceland have gained a step in eligibility and our Icelandic delegate of two years ago is now a member of the city council of Reykjavik, the capital. The women of Denmark, next to those of Norway, have made the largest gain, as Municipal suffrage with liberal qualifications has been bestowed upon them. English women have secured eligibility to become Mayors ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and I think I began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These authors I recall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelessly as they passed through my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandic poems, in the metre of "Hiawatha"; I had for a while a notion of studying Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and decided that I would learn the language later. By this time I must have begun German, which I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... essential to the plot, none of the Homeric detail as to the wounds appears. The same remark applies to the saga of Dietrich and indeed to most others; the only cases that I have noticed which resemble the Irish in detail are in the Icelandic Sagas (the Laxdale Saga and others), and even there the feature is not at all so prominent as here, in the "Tain be Cuailnge," and several other Irish romances, though it is by no means common to ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... were turned so wrathfully upon the Carios; in which opinion the chief assented, and wished she might destroy them all." [281] Some such superstitious fear must have furnished the warp into which the following Icelandic story was woven. "There was once a sheep-stealer who sat down in a lonely place, with a leg of mutton in his hand, in order to feast upon it, for he had just stolen it. The moon shone bright and clear, not a single cloud ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... carver to dispose his work in that fashion, by which he has enriched the whole surface at little cost of labor, and by contrast enhanced the value of the little strips and diamonds of carved work, otherwise of no particular interest. Figs. 49 and 50 are two sketches of Icelandic carved boxes. Fig. 49 was drawn as an example of the rich effect which that kind of engraved work may have, and of the use which it makes of closely packed letters in the inscription. The pattern is, of course, a traditional ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... made his own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his pack, dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his presence. For Brodie, callously brutish as he was, must be something less than human not to turn his chill blue Icelandic eyes toward the spot where he ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Scandinavian, see the List of English Words, as compared with Icelandic, in my Appendix to Cleasby and Vigfusson's Icelandic Dictionary. In this long list, filling 80 columns, the dialectal words are marked with a dagger {*}. But the list of these is by no means exhaustive, and it will require a careful ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... in which Mont Blanc might be buried without showing even his topmost snowfield above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction—fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the people—of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cases where the phenomena of rate have been studied with due attention, is in the evolution of the three languages of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden out of the Icelandic. What does this tell us? The last has altered so slowly that a modern Icelander can read the oldest works of his language. In Sweden, however, the speech has altered. So it has in Denmark; whilst both these languages are ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... eruption, by the direct effect of the calamity, and by the famine due to the ravaging of the fields and the frightening of the fish from the shores which it induced, destroyed nearly one fifth of the Icelandic people. It is, in fact, to be remembered as one of the three or four most calamitous eruptions of which we have any account, and, from the point of view of lava ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... the children's sight (there are twins in this case) and taken out as a dinner for the reapers who happened to be cutting the rye and oats. In Glamorganshire the woman declares she is mixing a pasty for the reapers. An Icelandic legend makes a woman set a pot containing food to cook on the fire and fasten twigs end to end in continuation of the handle of a spoon until the topmost one appears above the chimney, when she puts the bowl in the pot. Another ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... in two such widely different cultures as those of Iceland and China we should find the same law apparently at work; the periods are vastly unlike in actual, but not so in relative duration. We have no way of properly placing the maintenance of Icelandic and Chinese as they have been other than by simply laying down the existence of what we may call a Law of Retardation, whose ultimate causes we cannot fathom or classify, but which will stand as an opposite phase of the Law of Stimulation, which is more ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... the increasing number of personages who visit the park, it may be well to quote from him some of the theories he discussed and the opinions he expressed. On page 416, beginning the chapter with the derivation of the word geyser from the Icelandic word geysa—to gush, ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... of Europe to the other. The philosophy of Abelard during his lifetime (1100-42) had penetrated to the ends of Italy. The French poetry of the trouveres counted within less than a century translations into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish, Dutch, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish"; and he might have added that England needed no translation, but helped to compose the poetry, not being at that time so insular as she afterwards became. "Such or such a work, composed in Morocco or in Cairo, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Once a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made them feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with a hammer. ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... first European to reach the New World. About six hundred years earlier, Vikings from Norway settled in Iceland, and from the Icelandic chronicles we learn that about 986 A.D. Eric the Red planted a colony in Greenland. His son, Leif Ericsson, about 1000 A.D., led a party south-westward to a stony country which was probably the coast of Labrador or Newfoundland. Going ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... great Danish sculptor, died suddenly on March 25, at Copenhagen. Thorvaldsen was the son of an Icelandic sailor, who incidentally earned a living by carving wooden figure-heads for ships. The boy was born at sea, in 1770, while his mother was making a voyage to Copenhagen. At the age of twenty-four, young ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Faeroboernes Historie, in Icelandic, Danish, and the Faroer Dialect, by Rafn, imp. 8vo. Large Paper, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 42, Saturday, August 17, 1850 • Various
... hammer of Thor was in the form of the cross; see in Herbert's Select Icelandic Poetry, p. 11., and Laing's Kings of Norway, vol. i. pp. 224. 330., a curious anecdote of King Hacon, who, having been converted to Christianity, made the sign of the cross when he drank, but persuaded his irritated Pagan followers ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 • Various
... up suddenly with an anchor, and short range of cable, yet without jerking. [Said to be from the Icelandic snubba.] ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... answered the doctor, "who can say whether in the tenth century this name did not suit it? More than one change of this sort has taken place on the globe, and I should astonish you much more by saying that, according to Icelandic chroniclers, two hundred villages flourished on this continent eight or nine ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... traditional heroes, fierce encounters with giants and monsters were invented to glorify their strength and prowess. David, with a stone from his sling, slew Goliath. The crafty Ulysses put out the eye of Polyphemus. Grettir, according to the Icelandic saga, overcame Glam, the malevolent, death-dealing vampire who "went riding the roofs." Beowulf fearlessly descended into the turbid mere to grapple with Grendel's mother. Folktales and ballads, in which incidents similar to ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... destination. He told us that it was full of hidden rocks and sandbanks, and called our attention to some enigmatic object which rose in midchannel like a deer's horns from the sea. "There," he said, "are the masts of an Icelandic steamer which attempted two years ago to make that passage, and was lost. To reach Westray in safety we must double its farthest promontory." An hour or two later this feat was accomplished. We were once more in smooth water, and found ourselves ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... says Thorkel to Bork, in the Icelandic saga of Gisli the Outlaw, "bear in mind that a woman's counsel is always unlucky."—On the other hand, quoth Panurge, "Truly I have found a great deal of good in the counsel of women, chiefly in that of ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... the Heims-Kringla of Snorre Tarleson," he said, "the celebrated Icelandic author of the twelfth century—it is a true and correct account of the Norwegian princes who ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... remarks in his translation (i. p. 36 note): "Odin is the 'High One.' The poem is a collection of rules and maxims, and stories of himself, some of them not very consistent with our ideas of a supreme deity." The style of the Icelandic poem, and the manners of the period when it was composed, are of course as wide apart from those of Haykar as is Iceland from Syria, but human nature remains ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... theme of poetry in all European languages; six or seven German poets dealt with the subject, and it may be read in French, English, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Flemish and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Icelandic Geysers are, it has been observed, accounted for by the siphon theory; in other words, this theory supposes the existence of a chamber in the heated earth, not quite full of water, and communicating with the upper air ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... retained an old proverb which ascribes to the same animal "ti Maends Styrke og tolo Maends Vid," ten men's strength and twelve men's cunning, but they still pay to him something of the reverence with which ancient superstition invested him. The student of Icelandic literature will find in the saga of Finnbogi hinn rami a curious illustration of this feeling, in an account of a dialogue between a Norwegian bear and an Icelandic champion—dumb show on the part of Bruin, and chivalric ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... or by whom these myth-stories were first put into writing, nor when they assumed the shape in which we now have them. But it is said, that, about the year 1100, an Icelandic scholar called Saemund the Wise collected a number of songs and poems into a book which is now known as the "Elder Edda;" and that, about a century later, Snorre Sturleson, another Icelander, wrote a prose-work of a similar character, which is called the "Younger Edda." And it is ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... the sea, and they could not enter from the sea except at high tide. It was once believed that this was Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, but this is no longer believed. Here they landed and called the place Hop, from the Icelandic word hopa, meaning an inlet from the ocean. Here they found grape-vines growing and fields of wild wheat; there were fish in the lake and wild animals in the woods. Here they landed the cattle and the provisions which they had brought with them; and here they built their huts. They ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... ancient northern peoples, also, songs and runes were reckoned powerful agents for working good or evil, and were available "to heal or make sick, bind up wounds, stanch blood, alleviate pain, or lull to sleep."[179:2] A verse of an old Icelandic poem, called the "Havamal," whose authorship is accredited to Wodan, runs as follows: "I am possessed of songs, such as neither the spouse of a king nor any son of man can repeat. One of them is called, 'the Helper.' It will help thee at thy need, in sickness, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... and wrestled, for a long time holding his own; but Audun was a man of full strength, and at last prevailed. Grettir's next performance brought him into more trouble. Asmund had a bosom friend named Thorkel Krafla, who paid him a visit at Biarg on his way to the Thing, or Icelandic parliament, with a retinue of sixty followers, for Thorkel was a great chief, and a man of substance. Each traveller had to carry his own provisions for the journey, including Grettir, who joined Thorkel's company. Grettir's saddle turned over, however, and his meal bag was lost, nor could ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... a source of wonder. The word is of Icelandic derivation, and signifies gushing. As applied to phenomena such as we are now describing, its applicability is good, for, from the mouth of the geysers, there rushes from time to time an immense mass of boiling water and steam, creating a disturbance of no ordinary character. It is assumed ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... describing the creation. Under the auspices of Archbishop Absalon the monks of Sor began to compile the annals of Denmark, and at the end of the 12th century Svend Aagesen, a cleric of Lund, compiled from Icelandic sources and oral tradition his Compendiosa historia regum Daniae. The great Saxo Grammaticus (q.v.) wrote his Historia Danica ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... he seemed to live in a fantastic dream, as Edgar Poe must have lived. He had translated into English a volume of strange Icelandic legends, which I ardently desired to see translated into French. He loved the supernatural, the dismal and grewsome, but he spoke of the most marvellous things with a calmness that was typically English, to which his gentle ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... of Christiania, from the heights of Egeberg, a well-wooded hill in the southern suburb, it is difficult to believe one's self in Icelandic Scandinavia,—the precise latitude of the Shetland Islands. A drowsy hum like the drone of bees seems to float up from the busy city below. The beautiful fjord, with its graceful promontories, its picturesque and leafy isles, might be Lake Maggiore or Como, so placid and ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Scandinavian is the name given to the languages spoken in Denmark and in the great Scandinavian Peninsula. Of these three languages, Danish and Norwegian are practically the same— their literary or book-language is one; while Swedish is very different. Icelandic is the oldest and purest form of Scandinavian. The following is ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... mythical story of Siegfried. This composite Siegfried-Burgundian saga then became a common possession of the Germanic peoples, was borne with many of them to lands far distant from the place of its origin, and was further moulded by each according to its peculiar genius and surroundings. In the Icelandic Eddas, the oldest of which we have as they were written down in the latter part of the ninth century, are preserved the earliest records of the form it had taken among the northern Germanic peoples. Our Nibelungenlied, which ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... "Those springs, whose tepid waters issue as gently as an ordinary spring, are called Langers, or baths; others that throw up boiling water with great noise, are denominated Caldrons, in Icelandic 'Hverer.' The most remarkable is the Geyser, which is found near Skalholdt, in the middle of a plain, where there are about forty springs of a smaller size. It rises from an aperture nineteen feet in diameter, springing at intervals to the height of fifty or even ninety feet. In these ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... north country word for the mouth of a river, from the Icelandic. (2) "The Bay" (comp. ch. ii., and other passages), the name given to the great bay in the east of Norway, the entrance of which from the North Sea is the Cattegat, and at the end of which is the Christiania Firth. The name ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother; or whether if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known as much about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the case he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... 'Cymbeline' by Holinshed's chronicle-history. And the two greatest names in modern literature are suggested not only by this general fact of creative power, but also more specifically by certain characters in the trilogy. Audhild, the Icelandic maiden beloved of Sigurd, has more than once been compared with the gracious and pathetic figure of Gretchen; and Earl Harald is one of the most successful attempts since Shakespeare to incarnate once ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... barley. Cf. A.S. baerlic, Icelandic, barr, meaning barley, the grain used for making malt for the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... his Library manner had settled upon him now to the very tips of his fingers—"were pirates. The word is of Icelandic origin, from vik, the name applied to the small inlets along the coast in which they concealed their galleys. I may mention that Olaf was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... editions of Shakspeare's complete works in English, 17 in French, 58 in German, 3 in Danish, 1 in Dutch, 1 in Bohemian, 3 in Italian, 4 in Polish, 2 in Russian, 1 in Spanish, 1 in Swedish; while in Frisian, Icelandic, Hebrew, Greek, Servian, Wallachian, Welsh, and Tamil there were copies of many separate plays. The English volumes numbered 4,500, the German 1,500, the French 400. The great and costly editions of Boydell and Halliwell, the original folios of ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... to express the idea. This word occurs with very little variation in the modern languages, derived undoubtedly from the Teutonic, with a little change in the spelling, as Saxon mann or mon, Gothic manna, German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish and Icelandic like ours. In the south of Europe, however, this word ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... have their fairy tales, you will find in this collection examples of English, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian, Icelandic, Russian, Polish, Serbian, Spanish, Arabian, Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese fairy tales, as well as those recited around the lodge fires at night by American Indians for the entertainment of the red children ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... under the patronage of Blue-tooth, Hakon, with the title of Jarl, becomes ruler of Norway. This foul treachery done on the brave and honest Harald Greyfell is by some dated about A.D. 969, by Munch, 965, by others, computing out of Snorro only, A.D. 975. For there is always an uncertainty in these Icelandic dates (say rather, rare and rude attempts at dating, without even an "A.D." or other fixed "year one" to go upon in Iceland), though seldom, I think, so large a ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... that era of Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic "Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites, songs, and traditions. These began to fall under the notice of scholars about the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... something else which he liked better. There is an Antiquarian Society at Worcester, with a large and peculiar library, containing a great number of books in languages not usually studied, such as the Icelandic, the Russian, the Celtic dialects, and others. The directors of the Society placed all their treasures at his command, and he now divided his time between hard study of languages and hard labor at the forge. To show how he passed his days, I ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... narrative poems, which he composed with remarkable fluency. The most important is the series of versions of Greek and Norse myths and legends which appeared in 1868-70 as 'The Earthly Paradise.' Shortly after this he became especially interested in Icelandic literature and published versions of some of its stories; notably one of the Siegfried tale, 'Sigurd the Volsung.' In the decade from 1880 to 1890 he devoted most of his energy to work for the Socialist party, of which he became a leader. His ideals were largely identical with those ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... termed aluinnen, and aluen, which is sometimes Latinized eluoe. But the prototype of the English elf, is to be sought chiefly in the berg-elfen, or duergar, of the Scandinavians. From the most early of the Icelandic Sagas, as well as from the Edda itself, we learn the belief of the northern nations in a race of dwarfish spirits, inhabiting the rocky mountains, and approaching, in some respects, to the human nature. Their attributes, amongst which we recognize the features of ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... place of landing on the southern coast of New England in the vicinity mentioned. That the Norsemen made a settlement in this country, though only of brief duration, is a fact in support of which many learned treatises have been written, dealing, among other things, with what are supposed to be Icelandic inscriptions discovered in that section of the country, and the like, a consideration of which, however, would be beyond the scope ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... traditionary verse. A work constructed really with great ingenuity, native talent, what one might call unconscious art; altogether a perspicuous clear work, pleasant reading still: this is the Younger or Prose Edda. By these and the numerous other Sagas, mostly Icelandic, with the commentaries, Icelandic or not, which go on zealously in the North to this day, it is possible to gain some direct insight even yet; and see that old Norse system of Belief, as it were, face to face. Let us forget that it is erroneous Religion; let us look ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... on, rising, stretching himself, and offering a box of cigarettes. "You look well. Done any summits? When we get our affairs in order, I must be off somewhere myself. Northward, I think. I want a little bracing cold. I should like to see Iceland. You know the Icelandic sagas? Magnificent! There's the saga of Grettir the Strong—by Jove! But come, this isn't business. I have news for you, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... is the individual. The unit of civilization is the family. Prior to December 20, 1620, New-England life had never seen a civilized family or felt its influences. It is true that the Icelandic Chronicles tell us that Lief, the son of Eric the Red, 1001, sailed with a crew of thirty-five men, in a Norwegian vessel, and driven southward in a storm, from Greenland along the coasts of Labrador, wintered in Vineland on the shores of Mount Hope Bay. Longfellow's ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... "Vendilskaga," as Skjagen is called in old Norwegian and Icelandic writings. At that time Old Skjagen, with the eastern and western town, extended for miles, with sand hills and arable land as far as the lighthouse near "Grenen." Then, as now, the houses were strewn among the wind-raised sand-hills—a ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... but one language until about 1000 A.D., when they split up into two great groups, the East Northern including the Danish and Swedish; and the West Northern including the Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese. Danish literature boasts of some five hundred chivalric ballads (Kjaempeviser), on partly historical and partly mythical themes, which were composed between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was the Danish translator of the Bible who introduced his countrymen ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... life. The blue lights were kept burning, and eager eyes peered into the depths of the waters in case any face could be seen; and ropes were held ready to fling out in aid. But never a face was seen, and the willing arms rested idle. Eric was there amongst his fellows. His old Icelandic origin was never more apparent than in that wild hour. He took a rope, and shouted in the ear ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... noises'. The Norsemen of the Viking age were given to second sight, and Glam 'riding the roofs,' made disturbances worthy of a spectre peculiarly able-bodied. But, not counting the evidence of the Icelandic sagas, mediaeval literature, like classical literature, needs to be carefully sifted before it yields a few grains of such facts as sane and educated witnesses even now aver to be matter of their personal experience. No doubt ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... place him before you at the usual distance of ten paces; then name any friend of yours at present in Europe as a similar substitute for yourself—the principals only to use pistols—notify me by the Icelandic telegraph when you are ready, and then, upon return of signal, pop away at my friend. But, since it is not my wish to proceed to such an extremity unnecessarily, if you will admit that I may possibly have ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... for the first time offered with a critical discussion of their historical sources; lastly, because the old legends seem to show how the fancy of periods less critical than ours dealt with such facts as are now reported in a dull undramatic manner. Thus (1) the Icelandic ghost stories have peculiar literary merit as simple dramatic narratives. (2) Every one has heard of the Wesley ghost, Sir George Villiers's spectre, Lord Lyttelton's ghost, the Beresford ghost, Mr. Williams's dream of Mr. Perceval's murder, and so forth. But the original sources have not, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... whom Tacitus thus names, because his attributes resembled those of the Roman Mercury. According to Paulus Diaconus (de Gestis Langobardorum, i. 9), this deity was Wodun, or Gwodan, called also Odin. Mallet (North. Ant. ch. v.) says, that in the Icelandic mythology he is called "the terrible and severe God, the Father of Slaughter, he who giveth victory and receiveth courage in the conflict, who nameth those that are to be slain." "The Germans drew their gods by their own character, who loved nothing so much themselves as ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... tree Paradixion, traces of Oriental and old Greek superstitions can be seen. It was from the Latin versions of the Greek original that translations were made into nearly all European languages. There are extant to-day, whole or in fragments, Bestiaries in German, Old English, Old French, Provencal, Icelandic, Italian, Bohemian, and even Armenian, Ethiopic, and Syriac. These various versions differ more or less in the arrangement and number of the animals described, but all point back to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of adventure of the most romantic kind, and at the same time an interesting and minutely accurate account of the old Icelandic families, their homes, their mode of life, their superstitions, their songs and stories, their bearserk fury, and their heroism by land and sea. The story is told throughout with a simplicity which ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... using fire and sword freely, it is not a matter of wonder that his conquests were rapid and complete. It has been said of Harald Fairhair by his contemporaries, handed down by the scalds, and recorded in the Icelandic Sagas, that he was of remarkably handsome appearance, great and strong, and very generous and affable ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... demon peculiar to the north Norwegian coast. It rides the seas in a half-boat. Compare Icelandic draugr. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... illuminated, and extending in many instances, as in a fac-simile now before me, from top to bottom of the folio page. The contents of the volume may be learned from the following lines on the first page; I give it in English as the original is in Icelandic:— ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... the state according to the last official list obtainable. They appear daily, weekly and monthly, in nearly all written languages, English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Bohemian, and one in Icelandic, published in Lyon county. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... the many dreams which his active imagination had conjured up as a part of his mission. He was one of the earliest of that school of reformers, of whom we have heard so much of late years, that urge the readoption of the old Norse language—or, what is nearest to it now, the Icelandic—as the vehicle of art and literature. In the attempt to dethrone Dansk from its preeminence as the language of the drama, Ole Bull signally failed, and his Norwegian theatre, established at Bergen, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... wood fire. The room is fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that of the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all the world—language so simple that even great scholars ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... significant. According to Professor Anderson's etymology of the word, it means "the darkness of the gods"; from regin, gods, and rkr, darkness; but it may, more properly, be derived from the Icelandic, Danish, and Swedish regn, a rain, and rk, smoke, or dust; and it may mean the rain of dust, for the clay came first as dust; it is described in some Indian ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... CLASSICS selected to appear in 1916 are by natives of Iceland. They belong, however, to periods of time and to modes of writing remote from each other. Snorri Sturluson, the greatest of Icelandic historians, was born in 1179. His Prose Edda, the companion-piece of the present volume, is a Christian's account of Old Norse myths and poetic conceptions thus happily preserved as they were about to pass into oblivion. More than seven hundred ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... derivative of the Latin root should he given, unless to show that the word has come into English by that channel. And so of the Teutonic languages. If we have Danish, Swedish, German, and Dutch, why not Scotch, Icelandic, Frisic, Swiss, and every other conceivable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... popular book during the Middle Ages. In the East it was translated into Syriac(?), Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Hebrew; in the West it exists in Latin, French, Italian, German, English, Spanish, Bohemian, and Polish. As early as 1204, aKing of Norway translated it into Icelandic, and at a later time it was translated by a Jesuit missionary into Tagala, the classical language of the Philippine Islands. But this is not all, Barlaam and Josaphat have actually risen to the rank ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... brother, or brothers, but a treacherous friend or a secret, cowardly rival, who attempts the life of the hero and claims the credit and reward for his bold achievement. Many examples must occur to readers familiar with Icelandic, Norwegian, and German folk-tales which need not here be cited. In the old French romance of the Chevalier Berinus and his gallant son Aigres de l'Aimant, the King of Loquiferne is in love with the Princess Melia, daughter of a king named ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... power of making invisible from the cloud, says Mr. Kelly, [12] "that contained the heavenly fire from which the plant is sprung." Whilst speaking, too, of the fern-seed's property of making people invisible, it is of interest to note that in the Icelandic and Pomeranian myths the schamir or "raven-stone" renders its possessor invisible; and according to a North German tradition the luck-flower is enbued with the same wonderful qualities. It is essential, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... forward uncertainly, from side to side, as one carrying the white man's burden. (From zed, z, and jag, an Icelandic ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... but decorated them with carvings painted in gay colours, used every space for pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; the cathedrals ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... is an unfortunate confusion here between 'heal' to make 'hale' or '[w]hole' (Anglo-Saxon haelan) and the old (and Provincial) English hill, to cover, hilling, covering, hellier, a slater, akin to 'hell', the covered place, 'helm'; Icelandic hylja, to cover.] ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... The Icelandic mice have probably the most curious methods of travelling of all migratory animals. Dr. Henderson, an authority on Iceland, not only verifies the fact himself, but gives the names of many prominent investigators who have seen the mice crossing small rivers and streams ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... act in a mental realm, do we not? The sick man, then, becomes one who misses the mark, and therefore a sinner. I think you will agree with me that the sick man is not at peace with God, if God is 'that which makes for righteousness.' Surely the maker of that old Icelandic sixteenth-century Bible must have been inspired when, translating from Luther's Bible, he wrote in the first chapter of Genesis, 'And God created man after His own likeness, in the likeness of Mind shaped He him.' Cannot ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Peasants Returning to the Ruins of a Burnt House," in the Lansdowne Collection, London; "A Wounded Soldier Nursed by His Betrothed," in the Gallery at Copenhagen, where is also her portrait of her husband; "An Icelandic Maiden," in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Her picture, "Reading the Bible," was painted for Napoleon III. at his request. Mme. Jerichau painted a portrait of the present Queen of England, in her wedding dress. A large number of ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... WEBBE, Icelandic scholar, born at St. Vincent, West Indies; studied at Oxford; from 1845 to 1870 was assistant-editor of the Times; has translated "The Prose, or Younger, Edda" and Norse tales and sagas; written also novels, and contributed to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... functions of life seemed irksome and useless, and it took me some time to remember that I used to go to clubs and theatres, shaved, dressed, and dined before I knew her. The first months I travelled a great deal, straying as far as Iceland. The sight of Swedish lakes, Norwegian fiords, and Icelandic geysers conveyed to me no direct impressions; I only tried to imagine what Aniela would have felt or said to such a view,—in short, I saw with her eyes, thought her thoughts, and felt with her heart. And when presently I remembered that she was Aniela no longer, but Pani Kromitzka, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... INGEMUNDSON'S LAY. In the first half of the twelfth century an Icelandic skald of this name lived and sang at the court of King Eystein in Norway. He loved a young Icelandic girl, but had not declared his love. When his brother was going home to Iceland, Ivar asked him to tell her of his love and beg ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... characteristic difference between the Saxon and Icelandic (indeed between the Teutonic and Scandinavian tongues) lies in the peculiar position of the definite article in the latter. In Saxon, the article corresponding with the modern word the, is thaet, se, se['o], for the neuter, masculine, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... all so cosmopolitan and all-embracingly sympathetic. One day it was a paper by a Servian countess on the social life of the Servians, absorbingly interesting both in itself and because it was a countess who read it; and this was followed by the singing of an Icelandic tenor and a Swedish soprano, and a recital on the violin by a slight, red-haired, middle-aged woman from London. All the talents seem to be afloat and at the service of the strenuous ones who are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... completely buried beneath them. Over this city the mud accumulated to the depth of over 70 feet. In addition to these phenomena, molten lava often flows from the lip of the crater, occasionally in vast quantities. In the Icelandic eruption of 1783 the lava streams were so great in quantity as to fill river gorges 600 ft. deep and 200 ft. wide, and to extend over an open plain to a distance of 12 to 15 miles, forming lakes of lava 100 feet deep. The ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... first European to visit America, if the Icelandic records are true, christened the new land Wineland. It has been supposed that this designation was given for the grapes, but recent investigations show that the fruits were probably mountain cranberries. Captain John Hawkins, who visited the ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... respecting the fittings of the ship in which he was to have sailed he relinquished his purpose, and in 1772 paid a visit in company with Dr. Solander to Iceland, where he obtained a large number of botanical specimens, and also purchased a collection of Icelandic manuscripts and printed books, including the library of Halfdan Einarsson, the literary historian of the island, which he gave to the British Museum on his return to England. Ten years later he presented a second collection to that institution. In 1778 Banks succeeded Sir John Pringle ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... is here given from Buchan's "Ballads of the North of Scotland." Here also Professor F. J. Child has pointed to many Icelandic, Danish, and German analogies. Allied to "Kemp Owyne" is the modern ballad of "The Laidley Worm of Spindleston Heughs," written before 1778 by the Rev. Mr. Lamb of Norham; but the "Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea" is an older cousin to ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... nothing of philology venture to inquire whether the very close agreement of this tweet with our sweet (compare also the Anglo-Saxon swete, the Icelandic soetr, and the Sanskrit svad) does not point to a common origin of the Aryan and ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ &c. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the “Saga Library.” Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnússon, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... favorite heroes, he will find Sigurd there. In his gallery of wondrous women, he certainly cherishes Brynhild. These poetic creations belong to the English-speaking race, because they belong to the world. And if one will but recall the close kinship of the Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon languages, he will not find it strange that the spirit of the old Norse sagas lives again in our English song ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... dawn of the language, the word 'worm' had a somewhat different meaning from that in use to-day. It was an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon 'wyrm,' meaning a dragon or snake; or from the Gothic 'waurms,' a serpent; or the Icelandic 'ormur,' or the German 'wurm.' We gather that it conveyed originally an idea of size and power, not as now in the diminutive of both these meanings. Here legendary history helps us. We have the well-known legend of ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... trouble would have been averted. They compared him to the Ancient Mariner, but none the less they were proud of him and proud of the Englishman who had sent the manifestation. They did not call it a Sending because Icelandic magic was not in ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various |
