CHAPTER V.

VISITS--CONVIVIALITIES--THE CATHOLIC VIEW OF THE “REFORMATION”--SURTAR-BRAND--THE HOME-RULE PARTY.

The Reykjavikers may be distributed into four classes: the official, ecclesiastic, and civil; the merchants; the fishing-class; and the paupers. The visiting hour begins with noon. You open the outer door of the diminutive hall and rap at either side-entrance: but generally the left, otherwise the gynæceum may be sorely disturbed. The rapping possibly lasts for five minutes; the servant hears you or not, and if she condescends to open she usually stares, backs, and leaves you on the threshold. This class in Iceland appears to me the worst in the world--practical communists with the rude equality of the negro, worse even than the Irish help in the United States, or the servitor at Trieste, where the men are either louts or rogues, and the women are cheats, bacchanalians, or something worse. The domestic agrees to live with his employer for a certain sum, finds little to do, will do nothing but drink and be dissolute, refers frequently to the contract, tells the master, with true northern candour, to serve himself, and finally retires to the house of his brother’s wife’s third cousin. So the Greenlander gives warning by “Kasuonga” (I am tired of you). Throughout the country it appears a dishonour to do household work. Most of the farms, even when in debt, have some article of the kind, but generally it is an aged and feminine body, perhaps connected with the family and liable to starve when turned off.

On the other hand, if after knocking you enter, there is probably a startled rise and rustle of petticoats, like a flushed covey of partridges, the home-toilette, as in the nearer “East,” being the one all-sufficient cause. At this season well-to-do Reykjavikers rise at eight A.M.; breakfast substantially at nine or ten, and sally forth after noon to walk, ride, or call upon friends. The islanders dine at two P.M.; the Danes at four, and sometimes, when parties are given, at five--already an approach to civilised hours. A supper, mostly cold like the breakfast, is taken at eight P.M.; and thus, as in the homely parts of Austria and Italy, the evening visit is impossible. There is no better contrivance for cutting up society.

As on the Continent of Europe, the stranger makes the first call, and of course he begins with the governor. H. E. Hilmar Finsen, despite his Danised name, Finsen for Finnsson, is an Icelander of old and well-known stock, and he worthily keeps up the hospitalities of the late Count Trampe, whom so many English travellers have cause to remember with the liveliest gratitude. The family is a little hurt by the Napoleon book, which gives (p. 160) the genealogy of Vilhjalmr Finsen, in 1857 “magistratus” (mayor) “Reykjavicæ,” through Adam, Noah, Saturn, Jupiter, Priam, and “Odinn, rex Asarum.” The table was sent to the prince as a specimen of an Icelandic tree, and French sense of humour could not let pass the opportunity of taking it _au sérieux_ and printing it _in extenso_. After all there is a fine Old World flavour in it: so a Greek eupatrid found in his genealogy, either paternal or maternal, all his country’s gods both of Olympus and of the other place. Governor Finsen’s great-great-grandfather was the celebrated Bishop of Skálholt (1754) and editor of the Landnámabók, Finn Jónsson, who loved to latinise himself into Finnus Johannæus; his “Historia Ecclesiastica Islandiæ,” though much decried by Catholics, continues to be a standard work. The portrait of this worthy, in ruff and gown, is found everywhere; and the fine oval face, straight features, and serene blue eyes have not left the family.[382] His son Hannes Finsson was the last Bishop of Skálholt, when shortly before 1800, Danes, for motives of economy, fused together the two sees, in the person of Geir Vidalin, first primate of Iceland. About this time the patronymic began to be exchanged for the family name; the son of Bishop Finsson was called Ólafr (Olave) Finsson, and, he being a Danish official, a judge in Jutland who never saw Iceland, Finsson became Finsen.

The present governor’s title, Stiftamtmand (Icel. Stiptamtmaðr), has been lately changed to Landshöfðingsi (Danish), a higher grade without extra rank or salary; and the mayor (Bæarfógeti) has similarly been advanced to Landsskrifari, or official secretary. Hr Finsen is a civilian--admirals and naval officers are no longer the privileged ruling caste, and Iceland has gained by the loss. He speaks French, but prefers Danish; whilst his very young looking wife, whose six stalwart boys and girls suggest brothers and sisters, knows only her native tongue. We talked of the mysterious volcano in the depths of the Vatnajökull, whose flames were first seen about the end of August 1867: he advised me strongly to attempt the south-eastern corner of the island viâ Berufjörð; Professor Gunnlaugsson did the same, and the only dissentient voice was Hr Procurator Jón Guðmundsson. The governor was, I shall show, right.

The second call should be paid to Bishop Pèter Pètursson, who is also agent for the Bible Society.[383] This dignitary was most obliging in giving me information, and he presented me with a copy of his work, alluded to in the Introduction. He was then (1841) licentiate of theology, “toparchiæ Snæfellensis et Hnappadalensis Præpositus” and “Pastor Stadastadensis.” I asked him why he did not bring it up to the present day, and he replied, with excellent sense, that to write contemporary annals is a hard task; and that _De vivis nil nisi bonum_, though a fine Christian precept, is a prescription for composing history of very dubious value.

The approaching departure of “Le Cher,” and the presence of a Danish cruiser, and the mail-steamer, officered by the Royal Navy, caused an unusual outburst of hospitality. The first dinner where I “met the surly Dane,” and found him an uncommonly good fellow, was at the house of the good M. Randrŭp, Consul de France, a Continental, whose devotion to the interests of his native country has considerably “exercised” the political section of the islandry. I cannot refrain from expressing my gratitude to this gentleman and his family; he was ever ready to assist me and, indeed, all travellers; whilst madame and mademoiselle made visits peculiarly pleasant. A Danish house is always known by pictures and engravings of Copenhagen and other home scenes, in addition to family photos and loyal portraits of King Christian IX. and his queen; of King Frederick VII., who travelled in Iceland and left there the best of names; of the Prince of Wales and the Princess Alexandra, who has warmed every heart; and, perhaps, of the battle of “Schleswig-Holstein meer-umschlungen.” One enjoys even the artificial presence of trees, which look like the portentous growths of the Brazil or Central Africa, after the stunted vegetation in and around Reykjavik. The Icelanders sing or are supposed to sing:

“From the midst of Copenhagen’s smoke, We all yearn for home; Long, dearest, again to behold thee. The noisy din irks us; Revelry tempts us in vain; And the fool grins contemptuously at us In the streets of Copenhagen.”

The Danes slily remark that a good appointment and the easy temptation of rixdollars greatly modify all this athumia and nostalgia; and there is much truth in what the Napoleon book says, “Chose étonnante! il n’y a pas de patriote islandais, lorsqu’il est de retour dans son pays, ne caresse l’idée de s’en aller vivre dans un pays à végétation sérieuse” (p. 157). In a certain stage of civilisation, there is no place like home; about the end of the last century we find Ireland, that “mild and sedimentary Iceland,” styled the “kingdom of the zephyrs,” and grandiloquently described as a “country particularly dignified by the magnificent hand of Nature, whose liberality has denied it nothing that is necessary to constitute a great and happy nation.” A fallacy lurks in the well-worn quotation:

“So the wild torrent and the whirlwind’s roar But bind him to his native mountains more.”

The Switzer readily leaves his _mère patrie_, but ever cherishes the hope of returning, a wealthy man, to lay his bones in the place which gave him birth. The Englishman, whose native mountains are mole-hills and whose wild torrents are mere “cricks,” does exactly the same. The Frenchman, also an inhabitant of the plains, tears out his heartstrings whilst bidding adieu to “beautiful France,” but when comfortably settled abroad seems to care little for seeing her charms again. Perhaps I should speak in the past tense, for railways and steamers are levelling these differences.

All the guests spoke English and French, and all were very charming. They were curious concerning Bláland, the country of the blacks; and they asked about Dr Livingstone, whose name is known in every farm-house which owns a few books. They inquired if I belonged to the “Jökull Klubb” (Alpine Club): apparently in a mountainous country an Englishman must study mountains not mountaineers. The table is always _à la Russe_; flowers and fruits have been to our “groaning boards” what the cigar and the pipe were to the dessert and “wine;” only those who remember the last generation can appreciate this relief from endless side dishes and the barbarous hospitality which prided itself upon pressing an indigestion upon the _conviva satur_. The flowers are mostly artificial--I wonder why the tender and beautiful island heaths are not more generally used. The salmon from the Laxá and the sea-trout are undeniably better than ours. The venerable custom of drinking healths is still preserved: it descends directly from the “full,” or tumbler, quaffed in honour of Odin and Njord, Frey and Braga. Christianity converted these toasts to the Father, the Son (Kristsminni), the Angels, especially Michael, and the Saints; and modern conviviality has devoted them to present and absent friends. The habit is to “cap out” after bowing, and then to tilt the wine-glass slightly toward the compotator, with a second bow. When you help your neighbour from a fresh bottle, you first pour, as in the Brazil, a few drops into your own glass; and at a certain stage of the proceedings you do not administer a bumper. The sole toast was to Justisrað Bojesen, the governor’s venerable father-in-law, who was on a visit to the island. After a dessert of the _studentenfutter_, cold pudding, dates, prunes, and olives, all rise and, whether introduced or not, bow or shake hands, especially with the host and hostess, saying “Velkomme,” not “welcome” but “prosit,” a hearty old Danish, or rather German, practice, not indigenous to this part of Scandinavia. There is no sitting when the smallcoats leave the table; and probably from the scantiness of accommodation only men dine out.

The next banquet, being at the governor’s, was more official, only four black coats appeared, and even the mayor was dressed in uniform, gold-embroidered cuffs and collar of green velvet. Toasts were numerous, beginning with the French and Danish nations, which were duly acknowledged: and the two strangers, a young Englishman and myself, replied in French--not in Latin. After dinner we smoked and drank coffee, whilst the juniors, despising the damp cold, repaired for croquet to the “lawn.” At the bishop’s there was a strong muster of the clergy from the out-stations, in honour of the Rev. Guttormr Vigfusson, who had that day been ordained. Here, and here only, we saw snuff taken at table, and a use of the knife in the matter of peas and gravy, which still lingers amongst the best society in parts of Europe--it would be insidious to specify--but which Beau Brummel and his cloth have completely banished from England. It is only in the “Regimen Mensæ honorabile,” that we still read:

“Sal cultello capia- } } * * * * * }tis.” } Modicum sed crebrò biba- }

The bishop’s wife dined with us, and went through the laborious process of dispensing soup and meat to some two dozen guests; there was no room for the two pleasing daughters, nor for the adopted child--certainly the best looking of maidens at Reykjavik. We separated early, and after the Homeric proportions of the banquet a long walk was judged advisable.

The evening’s conversation taught me how thin-skinned are Icelanders upon all subjects connected with their country and themselves. I could not but think of a canny people farther south, who hold praise to be an impertinence, whilst dispraise, if it were not so truly contemptible, would be the one offence never to be condoned. Madame Ida Pfeiffer’s angry book was duly sat upon, all declared that she has misconstrued almost everything she observed. The fact is, that the poor authoress, when flitting through the country on her “weird visit,” was utterly misunderstood by the people, and showed her resentment by the use of her especial weapon. Even the genial and amiable owner of the yacht “Foam,” who, so far from wishing to hurt the feelings of any reader, has passed over in silence many things which ought to have been told, is not forgiven for the Latin speech beginning with “Pergratum est”--“chaff” is unknown in Iceland, and gives terrible offence to this painfully sensitive race. Chambers is a _farceur_; Prince Napoleon is harsh-judged for writing anything that might not please Icelandic readers; Forbes never rounded Snæfell; the late Professor Paijkull is a prejudiced foreigner, whose views about the sheep disease are simply ridiculous; and even Baring-Gould is incorrect in his details. For science, we are referred to Sir George Mackenzie; and for geography, manners, and customs, to Dr Henderson. It is only fair, however, to state that sensible Icelanders, who have lived out of this “living and antiquarian museum, recalling, as far as material and practical progress is concerned, the Europe of a century ago,” agree that Henderson praises them beyond all measure, and recommend to all Englishmen Professor Paijkull, as the fairest and the least exaggerated in general statements.

I already felt the growling and the bursting of the storm upon my devoted head. But the traveller who would do his duty to the Public must think as little as possible of blame and praise. The reader, and also the critic, enjoy high spirits, persistent optimism, and especially the “burying of all animosities, and condoning of all offences”--in fact, every tale of travel must be a Chinese picture, all lights and no shades. The end of a journey, like the resignation of a ministry, should cause a general whitewashing. If we tell the truth, we are sure to be assured that our pictures are forbidding or “bilious in tone.” My only reply is, that under certain circumstances they can be nothing else, if, indeed, they are to be portraits, and not fancy sketches for a Book of Beauty. I own to feeling a personal grievance against a writer who spreads before me all the sweets, and who hides under the table all the sours and bitters of his experience.

The next invitation was from Capitaine Alfred Le Timbre, of Saint-Malo, a pleasant, gentlemanly man, who spends his summer in looking forward to September, when the “Cher’s” head will turn south. To an Englishman the most companionable of Frenchmen is generally a sailor, and a Breton is all but a compatriot. Capitaine Le Timbre and his consul have no slight task in controlling some 3000 French fishermen, distributed amongst 250 vessels: the foreigners are bound not to land, and, indeed, not to approach the shore within the normal score of miles. This law is much broken; the men are often obliged to be invalided, and are sometimes wrecked with considerable loss of life: the underwriters after August add 1 per cent., and 0·50 per cent. for every subsequent fortnight. I afterwards travelled with nineteen of them on board the “Diana,” and found them by no means a “rough lot.” The people buy smuggled goods low, and sell provisions uncommonly high, and the results are frequent free fights between the strangers and the islandry. The former complain that they are always wrong in the eye of the law, and that their own authorities are ever the most severe in the matter of fines and imprisonment. As has been said, the Reformation made salt cod more valuable to Catholic lands; still sundry of our fishermen, when they fail at the Færoes, where the fish is better and more easily carried home alive, try Iceland: the Grimsby men are said to be the worst, the Hull men the best. An occasional cruiser is much wanted to keep the ruffians in order: Forbes recommended the measure years before H.M.S. “Valorous,” Captain Thrupp, appeared in August 1872. No English man-of-war deigned to grace the millenary festival of 1874--the successful effacement of Great Britain should be a matter of heartfelt congratulation to us; but _gare_ the recoil of the spring. The evening was pleasant, as usual on board a ship of war, and the belongings wore a home look, a civilised aspect, which made it more than normally agreeable--I felt again at home. The traveller cannot help remarking one effect of railroads and steamers upon European society: in dress and manners we all seem to be forming one great nation. One of the guests was a Hr Grímr Thomsen, who is favourably mentioned by Messrs Dasent and Newton: after being employed in sundry consulates, this gentleman of “grim cognomen”[384] has taken a pension, and settled at the old college of Bessastaðr, where he attends to agriculture, and looks after the fishing. From him I heard how far superior to Arab blood are Iceland ponies, and a curious local grievance--it must serve for a better--namely, that strangers come to the island under the impression that they cannot break their necks in it. He first showed me the popular habit of making unpleasant and antipathetic, if not rude, remarks: this mordant tone is still a mania in Iceland; it descends from the days of the defamatory songs, which spared neither gods nor men. And now, having dined out, we will turn elsewhere.

The Klafter (chat) Klubb is an institution even more primitive than that of Madeira, which, greatly to feminine and connubial satisfaction, used to close at six P.M. The many-windowed wooden building in Hafnarstræti is the store kept by Hr Möller, who manages the club, and allows it three small rooms somewhat higher in the ceiling than usual. It opens only on Wednesday evenings, when the principal merchants congregate to drink “toddy.” The yearly subscription is $12; and strangers, after being presented, may visit it three times gratis--unless the usual sharp practice rule otherwise. In such matters there is a conventional honesty; even in London the secretary will sometimes do for the institution what he would not think of doing for himself.

At the first opportunity I called upon M. l’Abbé Baudouin, now the only Catholic missionary in the island, which formerly had two. The road leads past the Hospital, and we can inspect the tarn whose southern bank is the Paseo for “beauty and fashion”--I rarely met any there but English. The little piece of water in former days was covered with wild fowl; now it supports nothing but yellow-green weed, especially when it shrinks in July and August. It drains large peat bogs at the southern or inland end, and when swollen it passes to the sea by the foul ditch before mentioned, fit only for stickle-backs. In winter it serves for skating, but it is not always frozen over, another proof of unexpectedly mild climate despite high latitudes. Of course it is very variable under the influence of the volcano and the iceberg: in 1845, the last eruption of Hekla covered the adjacent valleys with abundant vegetation; in 1869 and 1873, the greater part of the island was ice-bound for months.

On the western bank of the tarn are two targets for rifle practice, one at 95, the other at 112 paces. I never saw shooting there; in fact the only soldiering known to Reykjavik is when the Danish “Fylla” disembarks her short, stout, dapper, little crew, averaging twenty-two years of age, for drill under a tall quartermaster. On the other side of the road is the cemetery, guarded by posts and rails; the mortuary chapel, with its dwarf steeple, all wood, and lighter than those of the Sienna country, faces east. Crosses are everywhere, from the deadhouse to the _parva domus_: some of the tombs are not to be despised, and the epitaphs beginning with “Hver Hvílir” (here lies) are not the comedies of our country churchyards. It is a peculiar custom to keep the dead unburied sometimes for three to six weeks; and the measure can hardly be precautionary, as the bodies are screwed down in the coffins, and stored at the solitary cemetery. A resident foreigner lately exposed himself to prosecution because he interred his servant only six days after death.

Turning rightwards we pass a windmill to the south-west of the town. On its eminence the people assembled in May 1860 to see the flames and flashes proceeding from the “aqua-igneous” fissure of Kötlu-gjá, which, distant some eighty miles, shot up, they say, a pillar of smoke, steam, and scoriæ some 24,000 feet high (?). From this point also, we are assured, the gleam of the Vatnajökull volcano could be detected in 1867. The country beyond the mill is a barren stretch of stone, where dodgy plovers lay their eggs, and where swarms of gnats put the promenader to flight. A few steps lead us to the house of M. Baudouin, which is the best in the island; it was built by Bishop Helgi Thordursson, predecessor of the present dignitary, and the use to which it was converted gave some scandal. The Abbé fenced himself in with a railing and turnstile, levelled the warts, and manured the ground--the shells and the sea-wrack offer excellent compost, but they are never used. This was done seven years ago, yet double crops are still produced: the inordinate price of labour, $2 a day being the wage of a field hand, prevented further operations. Truly a few Trappist establishments scattered over the island would do an immensity of good.

M. Baudouin then built to the west of his dwelling-place a cross-crowned chapel, and preached to full congregations, who attended regularly--I should mention that he is an excellent Icelandic scholar. This proceeding aroused the wrath of the Reformed. Strange to say, in this section of the nineteenth century, a country which boasts of “liberal institutions” will not permit version; and, although the Althing has been strongly in favour of extending everywhere freedom of faith, propagandism is allowed only to commercial settlements. The house being out of town, Monsieur l’Abbé was warned that he was not _en règle_: the code of Denmark authorises a “subvention” to those who build places of worship, but “subvention” was altered by Icelandic interpretation to “permission,” and thus the good missionary was assured that he required permission to do what the law permitted--which is absurd. His opponents then tried to revive against him the obsolete tyrannical ordinances of the old Protestant world: he is an outlaw, he may be flogged, and even killed with impunity, whilst harbouring a Papist is punishable by a heavy fine--six ounces of silver doubled every day.

The Abbé wanted nothing better than to be a martyr, but of course he wanted in vain. Laws in Iceland are somewhat flexible things, exceptionally applied at times, and liable to be broken with impunity: so in England “law” contrasts pleasantly with the rigidity of “la loi” of France. In this island, where people cannot afford paupers, families are dispersed even more cruelly than in our inhuman workhouse system, and each member is transferred to his or her Sýsla (county): the country, however, can plead necessity for these severe conditions. M. Baudouin chose to lodge and board an unhappy household subject to forcible separation. Thereupon the mayor imposed upon the paupers a fine, which they refused to pay, and lastly, he ordered their protector to expel them. The Abbé stoutly refused, and asked what would result if the affair came before Chief Justice Thorður Jonassen? The reply was, “It will be as he sees it.” Presently, the authorities perhaps remembered that when something of the same kind happened in the north, the case was quashed by the Court of Cassation in Denmark--nothing more was said. As Rome proposes to establish a Vicar Apostolic for Scandinavia,[385] M. Baudouin bides his time. For two years he has been in bad health, and wears a frostbitten look; he now proposes to sun himself for a time in France, and after his return, to preach in Icelandic when he pleases and where he pleases. The Protestant party boldly hopes never to see him again.

I was pleased to hear from the Abbé a Catholic version of the Reformed movement which followed the proclamation of Christian III. in 1540, and more especially of the murder or just execution of that “illiterate and turbulent prelate” who ended the “dismal ages of papal darkness,” Jón Arason (Are’s son), whom foreigners call Aræson and Areseni, the last occupant of the northern see, Hólar.[386] His enemies declare that at eighty he had a concubine; that he unmercifully seized and otherwise persecuted, his opponents; that he never went south without an armed retinue of two hundred bravos; that he refused to go to Copenhagen, and that he was a rebel against the Crown. His friends refute the charges preferred against him; deny the hólmganga or duel which he is fabled to have fought with Bishop Ögmund; assert that the “Historia Ecclesiastica” contains no less than three contradictions, and persistently declare that J. A. was simply a martyr to Catholicism. The Reformers, acting under the Danish Government, were headed by Oddur Gottswálksson and Gizurr Einarson. The former, a son of the Bishop of Hólar, when studying at Wittenberg, had been strongly imbued by Luther and Melancthon with the spirit of the new faith; he afterwards became the first translator of the Bible, and lawyer for the northern division of the island till he was drowned in 1556. The latter was in turn secretary to Ögmund, Catholic Bishop of Skálholt, Lutheran priest, and, finally, first Lutheran bishop of the southern see. They suborned against J. A. one Daði, a peasant of Mýra Sýsla, in the Borgarfjörð; and Judas, as usual, pretending to be his friend, betrayed him to his foes. The house in which he was arrested is still shown a little south of the Kvennabrekka chapel: he was carried to Skálholt, the southern see, already Lutheran, and was incontinently beheaded.

Followed the usual scenes of persecution and destruction: we might be reading a History of England. The Reformers became deformers. Cruel laws were passed against the priests; the churches were plundered of their wealth; the various religious houses,--four monasteries, two priories, and two nunneries,--each of which, after the excellent fashion of El Islam and its mosques, had a school attached, were suppressed, whilst the lands were either sold, vested in the Crown, or made over to Lutheranism. It was a case of “non licet esse vos,” and the proceeding was exactly that of our Act of 1537.

Let me briefly remark that in treating of matters which happened three centuries ago, both Catholic and Protestant writers are too apt to look upon them from the stand-point of the present. Catholics see only the use of their establishments; they will not accept the consequences of defeat, and yet they know that by the rule “Væ victis” they would have dealt, had they been conquerors, the same measure which was dealt to them. Protestants note only the abuses which marked the age; they look upon the old system with a jaundiced eye, and they misrepresent, undoubtedly, often without knowing it, the state of the ancient Church. Thus, we find it chronicled that many of the Icelandic bishops were married, without being told that they might have been married before they were ordained. And if there is anything in the present day which draws English Protestants to Catholicism, it is the fact that honest inquirers find they have been brought up in gross ignorance, to say nothing more, of the rival creed.

The Abbé Baudouin is strong in the belief that by virtue of the jewel Fair Play he would soon revive Catholicism in one of its old seats. And looking at the lukewarm action of the Lutheran faith, the scanty hold it has upon the affections and the passions of the people, the laical lives of the clergy, the prevalence of the “squarson,” and the growth of “free thinking,” I cannot but agree with him. Indeed the revival of Catholicism is one of the phenomena of the later nineteenth century, which time only can explain. Is it a steady flame or a fitful flicker preceding the final darkness? Its statistics are wonderful. During the last eighty-five years in the United States, it has risen from 25,000 to 9,600,000, a proportion of 1:4 of the population; whilst _the_ faith of the nineteenth century, spiritualism (R. D. Owen), numbers only 7,500,000. In Holland, the very cradle of the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants are now about equal; and, whilst the census of Victoria gives 121 religions to less than three-quarters of a million, Catholicism in England seems bent upon forcing men into the extremes so distasteful to the English mind, upon dividing the country into two great camps, Catholicism and its complement Methodism. In Iceland the result of free propagandism would probably result in making all the people Catholics or Rationalists.

It was generally regretted that Dr Hjaltalín the Archiater, who was preparing for a trip in the “Diana” to Europe, did not take part in the festivities. I need say nothing about the scientific acquirements of this well-informed and most obliging Icelander, whose writings are known throughout Europe. He has travelled extensively in his own country; and I was the greatest loser by his departure, as otherwise he might have led me to the unexplored regions in the south-east. He was especially interested about coal, a subject which seems now to be undergoing revival in the north: a fresh impetus has been given to its exploration in Norway and Sweden: even in the Færoe Islands a Danish company proposes to exploit the beds. An expedition, accompanied by Professor Jonstrüp and a Silesian engineer, lately returned to Copenhagen, and revived the views of Professor Krazenstein, who in 1778 examined the Pröstefjeldt in the island of Suderoë. The report is that the people have used their coal as fuel for a century; that although not so easily fired as the English, it gives a stronger and more lasting flame, and that it is free from sulphur and other minerals injurious to the fabrication of steel and iron. But, after settling its calorific properties, the grand question is, whether the veins are in the real carboniferous formation, whose beds are thick enough to work profitably. Seams which occur in the nummulite-hippurite Jurassic formation mostly lead to loss, witness those which have been worked near Trieste, on the Adriatic coast, and in parts of the Libanus.

Dr Hjaltalín was sanguine concerning the coal lately found in the regions about Norðrá, a northern influent of the Western Hvítá River: the exact position is between the little tarns Vikrafell and Herðavatn in Norðrardal. He expects soon to settle a long-disputed question, “Has coal been produced _in situ_?” and the sister formation of the Færoe Islands, where a Danish officer, Captain Dahl, has bought a vein seven feet thick for $50,000, ought to aid in solving the mystery. It is found associated with the Surtar-brand,[387] a semi-mineralised lignite, common on the western coast of the island. Uno Von Troil tells us that cups and plates which take a fine polish are made of it at Copenhagen: this reminds us of the bitumen “finjans” from the Tomb of Moses, near the Dead Sea.

Uno Von Troil, Sartorius Von Waltershausen, and Professor Silliman maintain this Devil’s or black fuel to be a local produce of forests buried by ashes, and ripened by the superincumbent sand and humus. On the other hand, Professor Steenstrüp and M. Gaimard declare this “brown coal” to be flotsam and jetsam from the Gulf of Mexico. Professor Paijkull found in it some thirty kinds of growth: the vine and platanus, the tulip-tree and mahogany, associated with oak, elm, willow, alder, birch, walnut, fir, and other resinous vegetation. These items, if grown _in situ_, as they appear to be, suggest a change of temperature utterly unknown to historic times, and belonging to the flora of the upper Miocene, _e.g._, Madeira. Halley explained the intense cold of Behring’s Straits, by placing the Pole there before the earth’s axis had altered its direction. Others have attributed the change to the diminution of ecliptical obliquity, the excentricity of the earth’s orbit, the precession of the equinoxes, and the revolution of the apsides. Similarly the Markgraf F. Marenzi (Fragmente über Geologie) cuts the Gordian knot, by supposing an altered obliquity of the ecliptic, which may have acted, he says, in past ages even as the present ever-increasing excentricity of the orbit will in some 210,000 years produce another Glacial Period, and render Northern Europe uninhabitable. On the other hand, he remarks that however torrid may have been the hyperborean climates, they must ever have lacked the fructifying insects, peculiar to temperate, sub-equatorial, and equatorial zones. Judging from Miocene Greenland, the reverse would appear to be fact.

It is impossible to stay a week in Reykjavik without finding out that the world is split into two divisions, strongly marked as were our Whig and Tory of the last generation. The Danes are in the minority: they represent the utilitarian, the cosmopolitan, and, perhaps, the metropolitan side of politics; and they complain that whatever the mother country does for her distant dependency, the latter is ever clamorous for more. The majority is the Icelandic party, for whose political aspirations I can find no better name than “Home Rulers,”--warning readers, however, that the comparison must not be strained and identified with that of Ireland. The main difference of the movement, as far as I can see, appears simply this. Iceland is actually 1600 miles distant from Denmark, as far as London from Jamaica, and practically, when the post goes only seven times a year, as far as Australia from England. Again, the proportions of Iceland to Denmark (1,800,000) are 1:35, and the population is 1:25·70. England certainly would not refuse Home Rule to the Irish if they lived in New Zealand and numbered about 750,000. No wonder then that Iceland objects to be treated like a “Crown colony of a rather severe type.”

The islanders show a growing dissatisfaction with the Danish Government, which they declare to be, though mild, meddling and unintelligent--in fact, perpetuating the petty, “nagging,” and annoying policy which, lost the duchies. They might respect whilst they hated a strong despotism; but perpetual interference they despise as well as hate. They are urgent as Mr Butt, for leave to stand on their own legs, to manage their own affairs; the Danes have tried, they say, for centuries to govern them, and progress could hardly be less were they left to themselves. The worst that could happen to them would be to starve, in which case they would deserve their fate, and could blame none but themselves. They complain, and I think with justice, that individually the Dane is not sympathetic to them; whilst Icelanders learn Danish, which, however, they pronounce with their own accent, Danes disdain their language and will not even attend their church. Residents of twenty years declare that they never read the theogenic, cosmogenic, and mythic Eddas,[388] because they are literally “grandams’ tales;” whilst the Sagas or Sayings, moral and dogmatic, epic and historical, are a tissue of inventions, monotonous, moreover, sanguinary, immoral, and barbarous. The actual leader of the opposition, or Home Rule party, is Hr Jón Sigurðsson (nat. 1811), now in Denmark, a far-famed Norsk scholar, and an _employé_ of the Danish Government. “White John,” as the popular nickname is, shows his clean shaven face everywhere, photographed for the patriot party. He owns advanced opinions, but he rests within constitutional limits; his followers, of course, go further afield, and not a few of them may be called republican. He has the honour to appear in the Millenary lithograph with the following notice: “President of the Althing, President of the Icelandic Literary Society, President of the Icelandic Thjóðvinafèlag; has distinguished himself as an uninterested and faithful champion of the national and political rights of the Icelanders; besides he has made himself conspicuous as a thorough scholar in the history and legislation of Iceland.”

There is also a small and uninfluential Norwegian faction which seems bent upon drawing the islanders to itself, chiefly, it appears to me, because Naddodd and Ingólfr discovered and colonised Iceland, and because she still speaks the Norræna-Túnga: a few distinguished names, literary and political, belong to this political category.

In the Introduction I have offered a few remarks on the pros and cons of Home Rule in Iceland. But the history of the world generally, and especially that of Italy, teaches one great lesson--how easy it is to divide and how hard to “unify” a country. The line between local and imperial measures is difficult to draw and facile to be overstepped at all times of popular excitement: a manner of dismemberment is proposed at the time when the condition of Europe seems to demand centralisation. Diets in Great Britain will only assimilate her with Austria, which exists by a political necessity: statesmen say that if she were not she would have to be invented. We can all distinguish the dim form which stands behind Home Rule in Ireland, and I venture to predict that in Iceland it will be the shortest path to separation from the mother state, and to the re-establishment of the old Norwegian Republic.

END OF VOL. I.

_M‘Farlane, & Erskine, Printers, Edinburgh._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Mirum de Tyle, quæ inter occidentales ultima fertur insulas, quod apud orientales tam nomine quam naturâ sit famosissima; cum occidentalibus sit prorsus incognita,” says Giraldus Cambrensis, chap. xvii., p. 98, ed. T. F. Dimock, M.A., Lond. 1867.

[2] The Iernis of Onomacritus (who is supposed to have written about B.C. 535, in the days of Pisistratus). Its authenticity is defended by Ruhnkenius (Epist. Crit. 2), and by Archbishop Usher (Ecclesiar. Antiq., chap. 16), while Camden (Britan.) has claimed the island to be England. Adrian Junius, a Dutch poet of the sixteenth century, quoted by Moore (History, chap. 1), thus alluded to Ireland having been known to the Argonauts:

“Illa ego sum Graiis olim glacialis Ierne Dicta, et Jasoni puppis bene cognita navis.”

We shall afterwards find Sibbald identifying Ierne with Strathearn.

[3] Consult the paper “On the Stade as a Linear Measure” by W. Martin Leake, Esq., Journal of the R.G.S., vol. ix. of 1839, pp. 1-25. The word Stadium or Stade does not appear in the index of the first twenty volumes; and this is only one instance of the carelessness with which an essential addition to the Journal has been drawn up.

[4] We may ask in our turn what prevented him travelling with traders?

[5] Hipparchus ad Arat. (i. 5; confer Plut., iii. 17), also attests the scientific worth of Pytheas, and mentions how he explained the tides by lunar phases.

[6] See Rerum Script. Hiberniæ (Prolog., i., xii.), quoted at the end of this section. Of Pytheas we know little, except that he was a Phocæan or Massilian Greek, who is supposed to have made two voyages between B.C. 350 and B.C. 300. In the first, he sailed round Albion and reached Thule. In the second, he set out from Gadira (Cadiz) to the Tanais, which is popularly supposed to have been the Elbe. Both his works, “On the Ocean,” and the “Periplus,” are lost. Even Strabo, who seems to have had “that charlatan Pytheas on the brain,” does not deny his knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and navigation. G. G. Bredow (Untersuchungen, etc., ii. 122-129, Altona, 1800), C. H. Tzschuckius (P. Melæ, lib. tres, Lipsiæ, 1806, vol. iii., pp. 223-230), and J. I. Pontanus (Chorographica Daniæ Descriptio, Amstelodami, 1631, folio, p. 741), give many references to Pytheas. See also Histoire Littéraire de France, i. 71, et seq.; Bougainville (Mémoires de Paris, xix. 146); D’Anville (Mém. de Paris, xxxii. 436, and his objections to the traveller having visited Iceland, 50, 441); Murray (Nov. Comm. Soc. Goetting, vi. 59-63, 82-86); Fournier (Hydrographie, 322, et seq.); and Wagner (Ad Guthrie Allgem. Welt. Gesch., xvi. 4). Forbiger (Handbuch der Alt. Geog., iii., Leip. 1848) also quotes a multitude of authors, including Mannert, Humboldt, and Lelewel (Pytheas u. die Geo. Sein. Zeit., s. 30).

[7] These are the Acmodæ of Pliny (iv. 30), which can only be the Shetlands. Salmasius identifies the Acmodæ, Hæmodæ, and Hebrides. Camden makes them different, and refers the Acmodæ to the Baltic. Parisot informs us that off the West Cape of Skye and the isle of North Uist (the nearest of the Hebrides to the Shetlands) there is a great gulf, which, being full of islands, is still called Mamaddy or Maddy--hence, possibly, the Greek Άι Μαδδάι, and the Latin Memodæ. According to Dr Charnock, the name in Keltic may be translated the “black head or hill,” or the “hill of God.”

[8] Mela’s “Scandinovia” is one of six islands which are described rather as parts of a great peninsula than as regular “insulæ.” Amongst their Sarmatian population are the Oænæ (egg-eaters), the Hippopodæ (horse-feet), and the Panoti (all-ears), whose existence is attested by credible travellers (_Cf._ p. 165, Geografia di Pomponio Mela, by Giovanni Francesco Muratori, Torino, Stamperia Reale, 1855).

[9] Camden suggests that “Belcarum” was a clerical error for “Bergarum.” But Mela places Bergæ on the confines of Scythia and Asia, and he joins the Caspian with the Northern Ocean (iii. 5).

[10] To understand the full significance of this sentence, we must consult the context. The first “additional parallel,” whose longest day was sixteen hours, ran through “the Daci and part of Germany, and the Gallic provinces, as far as the shores of the ocean.” The second traversed “the country of the Hyperborei and the island of Britannia, the longest day being seventeen hours in length.” The third is far more applicable to Iceland than to the Shetland or Færoe groups.

[11] C. Ptolemæi Geographia, edidit Carolus Fredericus Augustus Nobbe, Lipsiæ, 1843. A correct text.

[12] C. Ptolemæi, etc., libri octo, ex Bilibaldi Pirckeymheri translatione, Lugduni, 1535. When may geographical students hope to see a portable English translation of Ptolemy, and be saved the mortification of carrying about this uncomfortable folio? The work was proposed many years ago to the Royal Geographical Society, and was rejected, I believe, on the grounds of Ptolemy being a mathematical writer. The paragraphs in the text refer to the Greek, the pages to the Latin translation.

[13] Ptolemy assumes the southernmost part of the old world to be in S. lat. 16° 20´ instead of S. lat. 34° 51´ 12´´ (Cape Agulhas). Already in 1800, G. G. Bredow (loc. cit.), recognising the imperfect graduation, had reduced Ptolemy’s N. lat. 57° to N. lat. 51° 15´, and N. lat. 62° to N. lat. 55° 15´.

[14] Lemprière and other popular books, contain the following curious assertion: “Ptolemy places the middle of his Thule in 63° of latitude, and says that at the time of the equinoxes, the days were _twenty-four hours_, which could not have been true at the equinoxes, but must have referred to the solstices, and therefore this island is supposed to have been in 66° latitude, that is, under the Polar circle.” La Martinière, of whom more presently (sub voce Thule), makes no such blunder. Ptolemy gives N. lat. 63° and _twenty hours_, in which he is followed by Agathemerus.

[15] It is suggested (Notes on Richard of Cirencester) that beginning with the Novantum Chersonesis (Mull of Galloway?), in E. long. (Ferro?) 21°, the latitudes were mistaken for the longitudes, hence Cape Orcas (Duncansby Head?) was thrown to the east, E. long. (Ferro?) 31° 20´.

[16] “On some old maps of Africa, etc.,” a valuable paper read before the British Association, August 1863: Herr Kiepert is greatly indebted to it.

[17] The error “S. Antonio,” for “Sâo Antâo,” is not the learned Mr Hogg’s; it is common to Norie and other books on navigation.

[18] It is regretable that geographers lost the excellent opportunity offered by the Vienna Weltausstellung of 1873, to determine in congress a single _point de départ_ of longitude for the civilised world. Now each nation has the pretension of making a first meridian of its own, consequently whilst geographical readers have a fair conception of latitude, that of longitude is especially hazy. I only hope we shall not lose sight of the desideratum in the Geographical Congress of Paris (1875).

[19] “A Discourse concerning the Thule of the Ancients,” by Sir Robert Sibbald, vol. iii., Gough’s Camden (Britannia, etc.) of 1787. See also Gibson’s edition of Camden, Lond. 1695, and Frankfort edition, 1602.

[20] The full passage of Tacitus is, “Hanc oram novissimi maris (the Deucaledonian Sea) tunc primum Romana classis circumvecta, insulam esse Britanniam affirmavit, ac simul incognitas ad id tempus insulas, quas Orcades vocant, invenit domuitque. Dispecta est et Thule” (alii “Thyle” and “Tyle”) “quadam trans: nix et hiems appetebat; sed mare pigrum et grave remigantibus: perhibent, ne ventis quidem perinde attolli; credo quod rariores terræ montesque, causa ac materia tempestatum et profunda moles continui maris tardius impellitur.” Plutarch, tells us (Life of Cæsar) that the very existence of such a place as Britain had been doubted. When Diodorus Siculus wrote (temp. J. Cæsar and Augustus), the British Isles were amongst the regions least known to the world: “Ἤκιστα πέπτωκεν ὑρὸ τὴν κοινὴν ἀνθρώπων ἐπίγνωσιν” (lib. iii.). Eusebius (nat. circ. A.D. 264) tells us in his Chronicon, “Claudius de Britannis triumphavit, et Orcades insulas Romano adjecit imperio.” Orosius (circ. A.D. 415) adds (vii. 6, Hist. Adver. Pag., libri vii.), “Cognitæ insulæ erant forte et ante Claudium et sub Claudio, non quidem armis Romanis, sed mercatoribus, aut etiam eruditis, Mela teste.” And Mela, who wrote in the days of Claudius, assures us (iii. 6), “Triginta sunt Orcades angustis inter se diductæ spatiis.”

[21] The mention of fruits in this passage banishes the idea of Iceland.

[22] Diogenes of Apollonia flourished in the fifth century B.C., and also wrote περί φύσεως--concerning nature--a treatise on physical science. In the days when Hanno the Carthaginian, passing the Mediterranean Straits, explored the western coast of Africa, an event usually placed in the fifth century B.C., although Gosselin (Recherches sur la Géographie des Anciens) goes back as far as the tenth, Himilco (Pliny, N. H., ii. 67) was also sent to explore the remote parts of Europe. Sailing along the shores of Gadir, Tartessus (Tarshish), and Gallicia, he reached the Tin Isles. His Periplus, originally deposited in a temple at Carthage, was used by Dionysius, and was versified by Rufus Festus Avienus in the fourth century, in his iambic poem “De Oris Maritimis.” He himself says:

“Hæc nos ab imis Punicorum annalibus, Prolata longo tempore edidimus tibi.”

And Dodwell justly observes (Dissert. de Peripli Hannonis Ætati): “Ea causa satis verisimilis esse potuit, cur tamdiu Græcos latuerit Himilco, etiam cos qui collegæ meminerint Hannonis.”

[23] Τά ὑπερ θούλης ἀπιστα. An abridgment is preserved by the learned Patriarch Photius in his Myriobiblion seu Bibliotheca.

[24] Juvenal here ironically describes the progress of Greek and Roman letters towards the barbarous north. The Britons are learning eloquence from the Gauls, and even Thule thinks of hiring a rhetorician.

[25] For “glacialis,” see Adrian Junius before quoted. The high-sounding and convenient epithet seems to have been applied to Ierne, as “ultima” to Thule. If the Romans did not hold Ireland, at any rate they knew it well: “Melius aditus portusque, per commercia et negotiatores cognita” (Tacit. Agricol., xxiv.).

[26] In Icelandic “Orkn” and “Orkn-selr” are applied to a seal. (Compare Lat. _orca_, supposed to be the grampus: Cleasby.) Pliny makes _orca_ a kind of dolphin (_D. orca_), and _orec_ or _orc_ is the Gaelic form; hence Cape Orcas, which is popularly identified with Dunnet Head, the extreme northern point of Scotland. We have no need to derive “Orkneys” from εἴρκω (_coercio_), these isles breaking and restraining the force of the raging waves; or from “Erick” or “Orkenwald,” or any other “Pictish prince famous there at its first plantation.”

[27] The Crymogæa (Sive De Reb. Isl., Hamb. 1593) of this learned Icelander will be found analysed in Purchas, vol. iii., and Hakluyt, vol. i. His principal argument is very unsatisfactory: “If Iceland is taken to have been the classical Thule, it must have been inhabited in the days of Augustus, which is contrary to the chronicles of the island.” This author’s chief objection is thus stated by himself: “Si etenim Islandia idem esset cum Thule, rueret totum hujus narrationis fundamentum de Islandia A.C. 874 habitari primum cæpta;” an objection which will be considered elsewhere. Meanwhile I prefer the opinion of the equally learned Pentanus, who says of Iceland: “Non heri aut hodie quod dicitur fuit frequentata, sed habuit indigenas suos multa ante sæcula.”

[28] According to Dr Charnock, he speaks only of the Sacæ, the Persa, and the Britannus.

[29] Dr Bosworth (Anglo-Saxon Dict.) quotes Boethius (29, 11): “Oth thæt iland the we hatath Thyle, thæt is on tham northwest ende thisses middaneardes thær ne bith nawther ne on sumera niht, ne on wintra dæg” (To the island which we call Thule, that is on the north-west end of this middle earth, where there is neither night in summer nor day in winter). Cardale (1, 166) also: “Thonne be norðan Ibernia is thæt ylemede land thæt man hæt Thila” (Thence to the north of Ibernia is that island which men call Thila). See also Orosius, 1, 2.

[30] The author here settles offhand a point disputed _ad infinitum_. Dr Charnock has shown that Scotland was at one time called Igbernia, Hibernia (the classical name of Ireland, corrupted from _iar-in_, the western isle), and from the end of the third to the beginning of the eleventh century, _Scotia_ was used exclusively to indicate Ireland.

[31] برة التنك (_Barrat el Tanak_), “tanak” being the Arabic for tin.--Dr Charnock in his various writings (Local Etymology, etc.), after referring to the derivation of Britannia from the Punic ברת אנכ, _barat-anac_, the land of tin or lead; and the Hebrew ברא, _bara_, in Pihel, to create, produce; quoting Camden, Owen, Clarke, Borlase, Bochart, Boerhave, Shaw, Bosworth, and Armstrong, gives the following suggested derivations of the name from the Keltic, viz.: from its inhabitants, the _Brython_; from _brit_, _brith_, of divers colours, spotted (ברא, _brd_, pl. ברדים, _brdim_, spots, spotted with colours); _bràith-tuinn_, (the land on) the top of the wave; from _Yuys Prydain_, the fair island; from _Prydyn_, son of Aez the Great; from _bri_, dignity, honour; from _Brutus_, a fabulous king of Britain; from _bret_, high, _tain_, a river; but Dr Charnock inclines to derive the name from _bret-inn_, the high island. It need hardly be said that the Tin Islands (Cassiterides) contained no tin; like Zanzibar, they were probably a mere depôt where the Phœnicians met the savages of the interior.

[32] In the following verse of Catullus (Carm. 27):

“Hunc Gallæ timent, hunc timent Britanniæ,”

we find “Britain” used to denote the whole of the British Isles.

[33] Kassiterides is Aryan not Semitic; the metal in Sanskrit being _Kastīra_, which, like the Arabic _Khasdír_, may be from the Greek. The Scilly islands were also called Æstrumnides, a name which occurs in R. Festus Avienus (loc. cit.):

“Ast hinc duobus in sacram, sic insulam Dixere prisci, solibus cursus rati est. Hæc inter undas multum cespitem jacit, Eam que latè gens Hibernorum colit. Propinqua rursus insula Albionum patet. Tartesiisque in terminos Æstrumnidum Negociandi mos erat Carthaginis Etiam colonis, et vulgus inter Herculis Agitans columnas hæc adibant æquora.”

All this, be it remembered, is borrowed from Punic sources. Therefore Hibernia is explained by Bochart as “nihil aliud quam ultima habitatio,” and Keltic Ierne is translated the “uttermost point.”

[34] The Greeks were in the habit of borrowing their geographical terms from the indigenæ, not from the Phœnicians. Yet Dodwell is hardly justified in rejecting Hanno’s Periplus because Greek names occur instead of Phœnician. I have already derived their Erythræan Sea from the Sea of Edom, and the Sea of Himyar (of which the root is [illustration: symbol], redness); and the “Mountains of the Moon” from Unyamwezi, still shortened on the coast to Mwezi, the general name for the moon in the great south African family of languages. Dr Charnock (Local Etymology) says, “Scotland is the land of the Scoti, who by some have been considered as identical with the Σκύθαι, Scythæ, who may have been named from their great skill in the use of the bow, their principal weapon,” and he gives O. Teut. _scutten_, _scuthen_, archers; Gael. _sciot_, an arrow, dart.

[35] Surely there is no reason why Macpherson should derive Hebrides from Ey-brides, islands of St Bride or Brigida, the Vesta of the North.

[36] Compare “Fulham” (volucrum habitatio), the home of fowls.

[37] Celsius, indeed, arguing from the universal concensus of the classical geographers, believes in the former insularity of Scandinavia; the secular upheaval of the coast, which in parts still continues, may account for its annexation to the continent. Thus Skáni and Skáney (the-_ey_ answering to the Latinised-_avia_), the modern term applied to Scania, the Scandinavia of Pliny and subsequent geographers, is still given only to the southernmost point of the great northern peninsula, the first district known to the Romans.

[38] M. Bruzen La Martinière (Grand Dictionnaire Géographique et Critique, fol., La Hage, 1738, and Venice, 1741) runs this sentence into the next, and makes the greater part of northern Thule barren. The text is the reading adopted by the splendid edition of Claudius Malvetus (Greek and Latin, Venetiis, 1729), and by the Latin translation, Basiliæ ex officinâ Ioannis Hervagii (anno 1531, pp. 92-94, and not divided into chapters). As regards the Heruli, whom Procopius calls Έρούλοι, we find in Stephanus Byzantinus (fifth century) Έλούροι; in Sidonius Apollinaris (fifth century, Carm. 7):

“Cursu Herulus, Hunnus jaculis, Francusque natatu;”

and in Zonaras (twelfth century) Άιρούλαι.

[39] La Martinière informs us that the Skithifini, Scritifini, or Scrithifinni of Procopius were the Scritofinni of Paulus Diaconus (sixth century), and the Crefennæ or Scretofennæ of Jornandes (sixth century). This Scandinavian tribe, according to Hermanides (Descriptio Norwegiæ, p. 46), held the country afterwards called Scredevinda or Scriticivinda, extending along the coasts of the Boreal Ocean from the confines of Finmark to the beginning of White Sea, and now included in Russian Lapland. The account of Procopius also tallies with those of the ancient Lapps.

[40] “Scana,” in Adam Bremensis; generally “Scandia,” and popularly derived from “Schön” and “aue.” According to Cleasby, the Icel. “Skáney” is said to mean “borderland,” and perhaps derived from “skán,” a thin border, surface, etc.

[41] The whole account of Solinus is interesting enough for detailed quotation: as regards Thyle being two days distant from Caledonia, and five from the Orkneys; the numerals are supposed to be clerical errors: “Multæ et aliæ Britanniam insulæ, e quibus Thyle ultima, in qua æstivo solstitio sole de Cancri sidere faciente transitum nox pænè nulla: brumali solstitio dies adès conductus, ut ortus junctus sit occasui. A Caledoniæ promontorio Thylen petentibus bidui navagatione perfecta excipiunt Hebridæ insulæ, quinque numero, quarum incolæ nesciunt fruges, piscibus tantum et lacte vivunt. Rex unus est universis: nam quotquot sunt, omnes augusta interluvie dividuntur. Rex nihil suum habet, omnia universorum: ad æquitatem certis legibus stringitur; ac ne avaritia divertat a vero, discit paupertate justitiam, utpote cui nihil sit rei familiaris: verum alitur e publico. Nulla illi datur femina propria, sed per vicissitudines, in quamcunque commotus fuerit, usurarium sumit. Undo ei nec votum, nec spes conceditur liberorum. Secundam a continenti stationem Orcades præbent: sed Orcades ab Hebudibus porro sunt septem dierum, totidemque noctium cursu, numero tres. Vacant homine; non habent silvas, tantum junceis herbis inhorrescunt. Cetera earum undæ arenæ. Ab Orcadibus Thylen usque quinque dierum ac noctium navigatio est. Sed Thyle larga et diutina pomona copiosa est. Qui illic habitant, principio veris inter pecudes, pabulis vivunt, deinde lacte. In hiemem compascunt arborum fructus. Utuntur feminis vulgo; certum matrimonium nulli. Ultra Thylen pigrum et concretum mare.”

[42] Both Ausonius (Idyl. 12) and Statius (loc. cit.) make Thule to be “Hesperia,” _i.e._, west of Britain. On the other hand, the Geographer of Ravenna (Pre Guido? v. 31) places his Thule east of Britain.

[43] Another authority was Ari Froði (Ara Multiscius), one of the writers of the Landnámabók, who also tells us (c. 2, p. 10, in Schedis de Islandiâ, Oxoniæ, 1716, 8vo) that these “hermits” chose not to live with the heathen, and for that reason went away, leaving behind their books, bells, and staves.

[44] M. Mallet’s Northern Antiquities (Bohn, 1859), p. 189, note by the editor, Mr J. A. Blackwell. Mr G. W. Dasent (The Story of Burnt Njal, Edin., Edmonstone & Douglas, vi., viii.) quotes Dicuili Liber de Mensurâ Orbis Terræ, Ed. Valckenaer, Paris, 1807; and Maurer, Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte des germanischen Nordens, i. 35.

[45] Or Columbanus (nat. circ. A.D. 559); he was born about forty years later than St Columbkill.

[46] The word “Culdee” is used by Dasent. It was reserved for a sub-learned and ultra-disputatious Icelander, Mr Eirikr Magnússon, to assert at the Anthropological Institute (November 19, 1872), that Culdee is a “general term for men of religious and monastic living, and that the epithet is derived from ‘Cultores Dei.’ The singular is simply the Erse ‘Ceile De,’ or ‘servant of God.’”

The following exhaustive note upon the Culdees was kindly forwarded to me by Dr Richard S. Charnock:

“The Culdees anciently had establishments not only in Scotland and Ireland, but also in England and Wales. They were numerous in Scotland, and continued there from the ninth century to the Reformation. Chalmers (Caledonia) says the Culdees of Scotland are not mentioned in history till about the beginning of the ninth century (circ. A.D. 800-815), and their first establishment was at Dunkeld, under the bishop of that see. They were afterwards (circ. A.D. 850) placed at St Andrews, where they had their chief establishment for many centuries; and it is stated by Buchanan that Constantine III., king of Scotland, who died in A.D. 943, spent the last five years of his life in religious retirement amongst the Culdees of that city. Chalmers states that before the introduction of the canons regular of St Andrews (twelfth century), the Culdees alone acted as secular canons in cathedrals, and as dean and chapter in the election of bishops; and that thenceforth both orders were joined in the right until A.D. 1272, when it was usurped by canons regular. He also says that the Culdees of Brechin continued for many ages to act as dean and chapter of that diocese, and according to Jamieson (History of the Culdees) the Culdees of St Andrews elected the bishop of that see down to the election of William Wishart (1270), when the power was abrogated; but in those early times it appears that the bishops in many sees in Scotland were of the order of Culdees. In G. Cambrensis mention is made of Culdees in the island of Bardsey, off the Welsh coast. The annotator of the Annals of the Four Masters (A.D. 1479) says, ‘By the Latin writers they were called Colidæi, Culdei, Kelidei, and sometimes Deicolæ.’ The Colidei or Culdees are mentioned by various other ancient writers, and by several Scotch historians, as monks in Scotland as early as the fourth and fifth centuries. But the statements of John of Fordan, Hector Boethius, and others, are entirely contradicted by the learned Lanigan. Smith (Life of St Columbkill) and Jamieson (History) have maintained that they were Columbian monks, or members of that order instituted by St Columbkill at Iona, in the Hebrides, and also in various parts of Scotland; and they have represented these Culdees as a very strict and religious order in those early times, from the sixth to the twelfth century. But Lanigan shows that these statements are erroneous, and that the Culdees were not mentioned by the Venerable Bede or any other ancient ecclesiastical writer as Columbian monks, nor in the works of Usher or Ware, nor in the five lives of Columbkill published by Colgan. Lanigan considers that the Culdees were first instituted in Ireland in the eighth or ninth century; and Aongus, surnamed Ceile De, a celebrated ecclesiastical writer of the eighth century, author of Lives of Irish Saints, etc., is supposed to have been a Culdee. They are mentioned in the Annals of the Four Masters and of Ulster (A.D. 920), in which it is recorded that Godfrey, king of the Danes of Dublin, plundered Armagh, but he spared the churches and Colidæi. It appears from Lanigan and other authorities that the Culdees were not, strictly speaking, monks, neither were they members of the parochial clergy, but were a description of secular priests called ‘secular canons,’ and attached to cathedrals or collegiate churches termed prebendaries; and although bound by rules peculiar to themselves, they belonged to the secular clergy, and are to be distinguished from the canons regular, or communities of monks, who sprang up at a much later period, and officiated in the chapters of cathedral churches. The Culdees also sang in the choir, lived in community, and had a superior called ‘Prior of the Culdees,’ who acted as precentor or chief chanter. The principal institution of the Culdees was at Armagh, and, according to Usher and others, there were Culdees in all the chief churches of Ulster; and some of them continued at Armagh down to the middle of the seventeenth century. The Culdees had priories and lands in various parts of Ireland, particularly at Devenish Island, in Fermanagh, and at Clones, in Monaghan, both in the diocese of Clogher; also at Ardbraccan in Meath: and G. Cambrensis gives an account of the Colidæi who lived on an island in a lake in North Munster, which island was called by the Irish _Inis na mbeo_, or the ‘Island of the Living’ (or of cattle?), from a tradition that no person ever died on it; it was afterwards called Mona Incha, and was situated about three miles from Roscrea, in the bog of Monela, in Tipperary. In the time of G. Cambrensis this island was a celebrated place of pilgrimage; and their residence was afterwards removed to Corbally, a place near the lake, where the Culdees became canons regular of St Augustíne. Though the Irish Culdees were generally clergymen, yet some pious unmarried laymen joined their communities. There were also Culdees in Britain, particularly in the North of England, in the city of York, where they had a great establishment called the Hospital of St Leonard, and were secular canons of St Peter’s Cathedral, as mentioned in Dugdale’s Monasticon; and got some grants of lands in A.D. 936, during the reign of Athelstan, and continued at York at least down to the time of Pope Adrian IV., who confirmed them in their possessions. We also read in the ‘Annals,’ under A.D. 1479, that Pearce, son of Nicholas O’Flanagan, who was a canon of the chapter of Clogher, a parson, and a prior of the Ceile De, a sacristan of Devenish, and an official of Loch Erne (vicar-general of Clogher), a man distinguished for his benevolence, piety, great hospitality, and humanity, died after having gained the victory over the world and the devil. It would appear by the Annals of the Four Masters that Culdees were found in Ireland in A.D. 1601: ‘O’Donnell having received intelligence that the English had come to that place (Boyle), was greatly grieved at the profanation of the monastery, and that the English should occupy and inhabit it in the place of the Mic Beathaidh (monks) and Culdees, whose rightful residence it was till then, and it was not becoming him not to go to relieve them if he possibly could.’ At the Reformation, a little later, out of 563 monasteries in Ireland mentioned by Ware, and also in Archdale’s Monasticon, it would appear that there was one belonging to the Culdees, viz., the Priory of Culdees at Armagh. See also Dr Jamieson’s History of the Culdees, 4to, Edin.; Maccatheus’s History of the Culdees, 12mo, Edin. 1855; and Keith’s Catalogue of Scottish Bishops, new edition.”

[47] Vol. i., chap. 8. This traveller did not visit the cave, but quotes from Olafsson and Pállsson, p. 927.

[48] This interesting letter was brought to the author’s notice by Dr Attilio Hortis, Director of the Bibliotheca Civica, Trieste. This young and ardent scholar has published for the centenary festival of Petrarch (June 1874), certain political documents hitherto unprinted; they prove Petrarch to have been, like almost all the great Italian poets, a far-seeing statesman in theory if not in practice.

[49] Bochart (in Chanaan, i. 40), quoting Diogenes and Dercyllides of Tyre, whose tables, according to Photius (loc. cit.), were dug up by order of Alexander the Great, explains Thule to mean in Phœnician “tenebrarum insula.” But this etymology reminds us of the Semitic origin applied to Britain.

[50] The Icel. is Thilir, men of Thela-mörk, mark of the Thilir, the Norwegian country now called Thilemarken.

[51] Dr Charnock remarks that “Thule” is the name of a river in Glamorganshire, of a place in Silesia, and a town in Westphalia; also that “Southern Thule” was a title given to a part of Sandwich Island, the southernmost region discovered by Captain Cook in January 1775. Lt. Wilford’s Pandit invented a Pushkara Dwipa under the Arctic circle, corresponding with modern Iceland. Camden (Britannia) warns us, not unnecessarily, against confounding the “insula in ultimis et extremis Borealis Oceani secessibus longè sub Arctico Polo,” with the Indian “Tylis” or “Tylos” (Bahrayn?), of which St Augustine (lib. xxi. 5, De Civit. Dei) says, “Tylen Indiæ insulam eo preferri cæteris terris, quod omnis arbor quæ in eâ gignitur nunquam nudatur tegmine foliorum,” doubtless alluding to the palm. Strabo, we believe, does not mention “Tylos;” Pliny refers to it in three places (Nat. Hist., vi. 32, and xii. 21 and 22).

[52] To which may be added, neglecting the “Automata” of classical and mediæval times (Pliny, i. 89; Ruspe, de Novis Insulis, etc.), Arons Island (1628); Sorea of the Moluccas (1693); the offsets of Santorin (1707); Stromöe (1783); Graham Island, near Sicily, which, in 1831, was thrown up to a height of 750 feet, and the three outliers of Santorin (1866). These little worlds enable us to study Earth in the art of parturition.

[53] From Palagonia in Sicily, where it was first described (1838) by that savant (see pp. 222-483, and 802, Dana’s System of Mineralogy, Trübner, London, 1871). The specific gravity is 2·43, and the fracture mostly conchoidal. The distinguished chemist, Professor Bunsen (Sect. ix., § 1), who, succeeding in producing artificial Palagonite, gives it iron, either magnetic or peroxide, and “some alkali,” a vague term: Dr W. Lauder Lindsay adds minor constituents, felspar, augite (hornblende), jasper, olivine, obsidian, hornstone, chalcedony, and zeolite. Professor Tyndall (Royal Institution, June 3, 1853) offers the following table:

Oxide of iron, 36·75 Alumina, 25·50 Lime, 20·25 Magnesia, 11·39 (not found by Dr Murray Thomson). Soda, 3·44 Potash, 2·67 ------ 100·00

In 1872, only a single and a very poor specimen of this highly interesting rock had found its way to the museum in Jermyn Street.

[54] From Stuðill, anything that steadies, a stud, prop, stay. A specific usage makes Stuðlar signify pentagonal basalt columns, and Stuðla-berg is a basaltic dyke (Cleasby). It is popularly opposed to Mó-berg, “a kind of tufa,” properly Palagonite, from Mór, a moor or peat-fuel.

[55] About ninety species of mollusk shells and the hard parts of echinoderms and crustaceæ have been found in the Palagonite of Sicilian Aci Castello. Lime, for the use of the shell-builders, enters into the composition of such tuffs generally, and the percentage depends upon the percentage of shells. Silica is extracted from it by carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen; and this mineral again depends upon the included quantity of infusorial skeletons. Professor Quekett, Dr Gulliver, and other authorities, have examined specimens of Icelandic Palagonite, in which they could not detect infusoria nor their skeletons, even after boiling in nitric acid.

[56] The word “trap” will be used in these pages to denote the lavas ejected by submarine volcanoes.

[57] Until late years the general opinion was that all basalts are of igneous formation. The contrary has been supported by Mr H. P. Malet (Geogr. Mag., August 1874), to mention no others: he finds in that of Rossberg and the “Rowley Rag” vegetable, animal, and earthy particles which, passed through the fire, would have vanished in vapour. The distinction, therefore, between basalt and basaltic lava becomes fundamental. Granite, again, is by the same writer taken from Hutton and returned to Werner. The author could not but observe, when travelling in the basaltic Haurán, in that Bashan which, according to some, gave a name to the mineral, that the dried mud split under the sun into lozenges and pentagonal flakes (Unexplored Syria, i. 215). Upon this subject more will be said in Chapter XIV.

[58] Forchhammer considered this trachyte an unknown variety of felspar, and called it Baulite.

[59] See Chapter XI.

[60] The date “revealed to Moses” has long delayed the progress of science, and the 6000 years or so, still linger in the orthodox brains. The Hindus and the Moslems were far wiser, or rather better informed; the latter provide for the countless Æons of the past by the theory of Pre-Adamite kings and races.

[61] The Jökull (_plur._ Jöklar) is explained _passim_. Suffice it here to say, that it is a mass of eternal ice formed by the enormous pressure of the superincumbent snow; it is not correct, but it is decidedly convenient to render it by “glacier.” The Fell (our “fell,” pronounced _Fedl_ or _Fetl_) is a single block or peak, and in the plural, a range or sierra; it is mostly free from snow during the summer heats. Fjall (_Fyadl_, and _plur_. Fjöll) is the generic term “mons” and κατ’ ἐξοχὴν; it is applied in Icelandic literature to the Alps.

[62] Here is the culminating point of the island, usually assumed at 6500 English feet, more than one-third higher than Vesuvius (4000 feet).

[63] Usually assumed at 6000 English feet.

[64] Generally exaggerated to 5700 English feet.

[65] Popularly reckoned at 5900 English feet.

[66] This is about the forest limit of Scandinavia (2500 feet). The spruce fir first disappears, the Scotch fir rises a few hundred feet higher, and the highest is the birch, common and dwarf (_Betula alba_ and _nana_).

[67] Sprengisandur; from “sprengja,” to burst, to split (in an active sense); “að sprengja hest,” to burst a horse, to ride it till it bursts. This is the reason of the name: the Sprengisandur has so few halting places, that there is a danger of working the horse to death before coming to a station. It is generally and erroneously translated “springing,” _i.e._, wind-blown, sands. The Ruba’ el Kháli (“empty fourth,” or quarter) is the great Arabian Desert.

[68] Drangr, = a lonely, upstanding rock; in popular lore, rocks thought to be giants turned into stones.

[69] The total number of recorded eruptions between A.D. 894 and 1862 is given by Baring-Gould, Introduction, xxi.-xxiii. There have been eighty-six from twenty-seven (reckoned in round numbers to be thirty) different spots, and the intervals of repose have varied in Hekla from six to seventy-six years; in Kötlu-gjá from six to three hundred and eleven. Such is the statement generally made. The fact is, however, that the exact number of the eruptions is not known, as the annals are more or less confused. The number of volcanic foci in Iceland is popularly and roughly laid down at twenty, and of these three are called active--Hekla, Katla or Kötlu-gjá, and the Vatnajökull volcano. It is a large proportion out of the total assigned to the world; the latter varies between the extremes of 167 and 300, showing the uncertainty of our present knowledge. Popular books speak of 2000 eruptions per century, or an average of twenty per annum.

[70] Smoke also appeared in the sea off Reykjanes, and pumice was thrown upon the shore during February 1834. This phenomenon was followed by an earthquake at Reykjavik, August 15-20, 1835.

[71] The formation of these four items will be explained in a subsequent page; they are very improperly massed together.

[72] The year after the author’s departure witnessed an eruption of the Skaptárjökull, in the north-west corner of the Vatnajökull, but it lasted only four to five days. The following account appeared in the papers; nothing more has subsequently been learned about it. But how can this outbreak “witness against Captain Burton’s assertion in the _London Standard_”--the same assertion which is here repeated in the text, and which was made in 1872?

“An Icelandic gentleman has kindly forwarded to us the following account of the eruption of the Skaptárjökull (announced by telegraph from Lerwick yesterday), as witnessed by him from Reykjavik, about 100 miles distant:

“‘REYKJAVIK, March 23, 1873.

“‘On Thursday, the 9th of January, about three o’clock A.M., we observed from Reykjavik a grand fire in east-north-east direction, and all agreed that it was “some neighbouring farm burning,” with haystacks. The fire shot up like lightning, displaying beautiful evolutions in combination with the electricity above. Indeed, it was exactly like a fine display of rockets and wheels, and so bright was it, that during the dark morning hours we all thought it must be very close to Reykjavik. But when daylight dawned, and we could discern the mountains, we observed a thick and heavy column of vapour or steam far in the background, beyond all mountains visible, so it was clear that it was far off, and, according to the direction, it seemed most likely to be in Skaptárjökull, the west part of Vatnajökull--the great waste of glaciers in the east and south of the island. Morning and night this grand display was visible during the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th, and during the day the column of steam and smoke stood high in the sky.

“‘When similar news came from east, north, and west, all came to the same conclusion, that it must be in Skaptárjökull--witnessing against Captain Burton’s assertion in the _London Standard_--and according to the different points of observation, and the statement of our newspaper at Reykjavik, the position of the crater ought to be between 64° 7´ and 64° 18´ north lat., and 30° 45´ and 30° 55´ west long. from the meridian of Copenhagen.

“‘In the east, near Berufjörð, as stated in the northern paper, some shocks were felt, and fire was seen from many farms. Ashes, too, had fallen over the north-east coast, so that pasture fields were covered so far that the farmers had to take their sheep into the huts and feed them. But the paper says: “In the south no earthquakes were felt, or noises heard in the earth, far or near, as far as Markarfljót (near Eyjafjallajökull). Nowhere has been observed any fall of ashes or dust, but all over a bad smell was felt, and also here in Reykjavik in the forenoon of the 10th. The people of Landeyjar (opposite Westmann Islands) assert the same to have been the case there on the first day of the eruption, but here, at Reykjavik, it was not observed that day, but we felt the air very close, particularly on the 9th, from three to five o’clock in the afternoon, with some smell of sulphur and powder, very like the smell from a lately discharged gunbarrel.”

“‘No change was observed in the sun, moon, etc. The sky was clear all these days. The direction of the wind was from N.W.--W.S.W., and the weather fine. At Laudeyjum the wind had been E.N.E. on the 10th, with a strong breeze, and the column of steam got very high, and mist hid all the eastern horizon, but no fall of ashes took place.

“‘This eruption lasted only four or five days, and is not likely to have done any damage to inhabited parts or pasture grounds, except in so far as the fall of ashes might hurt the sheep.

“‘The weather has been very changeable during the whole winter, but very little snow has fallen in the southern part of the country. The cod-fishing has been very favourable when the boats have been able to go out. During the stormy weather some fishermen were lost. On the 1st of March we had a very heavy fall of snow, but since then the weather has been mild but rather stormy.’”

[73] It was reported that there were a hundred wrecks, the “Abydos” alone being able to ride out the storm.

[74] I have given an account of this event in “Ocean Highways,” February 1874.

[75] The late Professor Forbes was the first to show that Iceland, the Færoes, the Hebrides, Ireland, and Iberia, are connected by a “continuous tract of land, ranging from the Azores along the line of that belt of gulf-weed which exists between N. lat. 15° and 45°.”

[76] This eruption is reported to have discharged a mass of lava greater in bulk than Mount Etna. According to Henderson (_i._ 274-289, who borrows from the account of Chief-Justice Stephensen), it destroyed 9336 human beings, 28,000 horses, 11,461 head of cattle, and 190,488 sheep. This mortality resulted either directly from the ejection of molten lava and stone showers, débâcles and aqueous lavas; or from pestilence, the effect of sulphureous and other noxious vapours; or from famine, the fish leaving the coast, and the pasturage being destroyed by erupted sand and ashes.

[77] Fjörðr, _plur._ Firðir.

[78] Út-ver in Icel. is an outlying place for fishing, etc.; hardly corresponding with the continental “udver.”

[79] See Journal, chap. 5.

[80] Surtr, _i.e._, the Black, an Eddic name of a fire-giant.

[81] Englishmen would call them “old men.”

[82] Henderson (i. 127) translates “Höfdabrecka” by “Breakneck.” Hálsavegr is from “háls,” Scotticè “halse.”

[83] Á (fem.) at the end of a word means a water, as Temsá = Thames River: so the German Don-au is the Iceland Dóná, the Danube. The root may be traced through the Sanskrit _Ap_, the Persian [Illustration: Persian], and the Latin _Aqua_ to almost all families of European speech. Uncomposed, the Icelandic “Vatn” means water or lake.

[84] In old vellums spelt invariably Vatz, Vaz, or Vazt, and Vass is the modern pronunciation. Only in two instances not dating earlier than the twelfth century, we find Vatr, with the _r_ common to all Teutonic peoples, and showing its connection with Wasser and Water (Cleasby).

[85] Paijkull translates the word “to ascend violently.” It is derived from _að gjósa_, to gush. Max Müller (Science of Language, Longmans, 1862) derives it from the root which gives ghost, geist, gust, yeast, gas, etc.

[86] The dictionary gives only Náma or Námi, a mine or pit, for this word of general use.

[87] Lyell’s Principles of Geology, vol. i., p. 241, 11th edition. A fuller notice of this isotherm (32° F.) is given in Baring-Gould’s Introduction, pp. xxx., xxxi.

[88] The question is of vast practical importance. Upon it hinges the decision whether future Polar voyages, so necessary to the advanced study of electrical phenomena, to mention no other, shall take the route by Smith’s Sound or by Spitzbergen. For the battle of the Gulf Stream and Polar current between the Færoes and Iceland, see the Mittheilungen, xvi. (Nos. vi. and vii. of 1870), where the Gulf Stream is made to show 36°·5 F. as far as Novaya Zemlja, and to enter the Polar basin with diminution of temperature. The two distinct strata, the warm (40°-80° F.), and the heavier and more saline cold (about 35° F.) in the channel of the Færoes towards Scotland, have been described by Drs Carpenter and Wyville Thomson, the last time at the British Association, Sect. E, August 22, 1874.

[89] The author and his late friend F. F. Steinhaeuser, were never satisfied with Admiral Maury’s “Ocean River,” even though this ῥοὴ ὠκεανοῖο flowed more rapidly and was a thousand times larger than the Mississippi--larger, indeed, than “all the rivers of the globe put together.” Like the Pacific Kurosiwo or Black Stream, off Japan, it always suggested the idea of being only the main artery, the most important and noticeable part of a great whole.

[90] The most extensive are those of M. Victor Lottier (Physique, etc.), printed in the Gaimard work, and containing three parts: I. Observations of magnetism--declination, inclination, diurnal variation and intensity. II. Meteorology--barometer and thermometer; force of winds, Aurora Borealis, etc. III. Miscellaneous observations; astronomical phenomena; tides; remarks on maps and stations of the expedition. The Smithsonian Institute has published many studies of the Icelandic climate: in Scotland, also, as will presently appear, much has been done.

[91] The author has been unable to find at Trieste, the publications of the “Smithsonian Institute.”

[92] Old writers declared that the mercury habitually rose higher in Norway and Iceland than in England and France; moreover, that the air particles being more compressed and heavier, diminished the weight of objects. Thus, we are assured, 1000 lbs. of copper at Rouen = 1010 at Throndhjem.

[93] The author did not see a thunderstorm during his stay in Iceland. As regards reverberation, he remarked on the Camerones Mountain, when above the electrical discharges, and when free from the echo of earth, that the lightning was followed only by a short, sharp report, without any “rolling.”

[94] Ozone is utterly absent during the Sharki or Scirocco of Syria, and the trying effects of the east wind upon the constitution are well known to every resident. This is the more curious as it exists in the adjoining desert, when in the Nile valley and in the oases it is comparatively deficient. It has lately been proved to be everywhere more abundant in winter than in summer.

[95] It is there called Soel-far Vind (sun-faring wind); hence Sól-gangs veðr means weather of the sun’s course. The normal continental winds are (1.) the Land-south (south-east), warm, and therefore called Korn-moen, or the mother of corn; (2.) the north-east, termed Hambakka because it melts snow from the hill-tops; (3.) the Haf-gul (sea cooler), the west wind or sea breeze of the tropics, blowing from noon till midnight; and (4.) the Land-gul (land cooler), the east or land breeze, lasting from 2 A.M. to 10 A.M.

[96] Mr J. A. Hjaltalín remarks, “Thoka is equivalent to the English fog, and Sjólæða (sea creeper) is the mist which lies on the surface of the water, leaving the hill-tops clear. These are the only Icelandic names known to me.”

[97] The term is also applied to lightning, and to meteors generally. Hooker corrupts it to “Laptelltur,” and he has been copied into many a popular book.

[98] The word is written Nikuðr and Nikuðs, Hnikar and Nikarr: originally a title of Odin, it has survived in the Icel. Nykr, a nick or water-goblin in the shape of a grey sea-horse, with inverted hoofs; and in the German Nix, a nymph or water-fairy.

[99] Or a “carrion lowe” (Cleasby).

[100] Even at Trieste, which is the heart of the temperates, with the parallel of 45° passing near it, there is an autumn, but no spring, the weather changing at once from cold to heat.

[101] Svasuðr, the name of a giant, the father of Summer. See the Edda.

[102] The way of counting amongst the old Scandinavians and Teutons was complex and curious, as they had no indeclinable numeral adjectives from twenty to a hundred (_i.e._, 120): the word “tigr,” a ten or decade, was a noun like Hundrað and Thúsund. Thus 41 was called 4 tens and 1, or “1 of the fifth decade;” 45 was “half the fifth tenth;” and 48 was “4 tens and 8;” or going back (like the Lat. un-de-viginti and duo-de-triginta) “5 tens short of 2.” In the fourteenth century “tigr” began to lose its character as a substantive (Cleasby).

[103] Mr Dasent says the Thursday between April 9 and 15 (O. S.).

[104] Modern, Góa.

[105] “Gaukmánuðr,” according to Guðbrandr Vigfusson, from the middle of April to the middle of May. Gaukr is the Scotch gowk, the cuckoo. Hrossa-gaukr, “horse cuckoo,” is the green sandpiper, from its peculiar cry (Cleasby). In Sect. 7 the word will be found to have another meaning.

[106] According to the old Icelandic computation of time, as given in the Almanak, Heyanuir was the first month, and began the 25th of July; II. Tvímánuðr; III. Haustmánuðr; IV. Gormánuðr; V. Frermánuðr; VI. Mörsugr; VII. Thorri; VIII. Gói; IX. Einmánuðr; X. Harpa; XI. Skerpla; XII. Sólmánuðr, ending on the 20th of July. From July 21st to 24th are called Aukanætur. The names of the months VII. to IX. are still popularly known. For the rest, the Icelanders count by winter weeks and summer weeks, when they do not use the common names of the months. The terms given by Finnur Magnússon in Specimen Calendarii, _e.g._, Miðvetrarmánuðr, Föstuinngangsmánuðr, are never used, and it cannot be seen that they ever were known to the people.

[107] See the Icel. treatise called “Fingra-rím;” rím = computation, calendar: A. S. rîm, and ge-rîm.

[108] Dagsmark, “day-mark,” means both the space of three hours (_trihorium_) and the mark by which this period is fixed.

[109] Others derive it from vika, a week.

[110] Dillon reduces it at Reykjavik to three, and he found the sunlight during Christmas little lighter than our twilights; but the winter was worse than usual.

[111]

Synopsis of dates: A.D. 860 (861, Uno Von Troil). Iceland touched at by Naddodd. About this time (862), the Scandinavians, according to Nestor, founded the Russian empire. ” 864. Garðar Svafarson built the first house in “Garðarshólm.” ” 874. First official colonisation of Iceland by Ingólfr Arnarson. ” 877. Gunnbjörn discovered the Gunnbjörnarsker and coast of Greenland. ” 929. Althing or Diet founded by Ulfljót. ” 930-1300. Augustan age of literature under the aristocratic Republic. ” 981-1000. Official discovery of the New World by the Northmen. ” 982. Greenland visited by Eirikr Rauði (Eric the Red), father of Leifr the Lucky. ” 986. First colony in Greenland established by the same. In 1124 the Bishop’s See was placed at Garðar. ” 1262-1264. Iceland incorporated with Norway. ” 1380. ” ” ” Denmark. ” 1477. Iceland visited by Columbus. ” 1540-1551. Lutheranism prevailed over Catholic Christianity. ” 1800. Althing abolished. ” 1843. ” re-established. ” 1845. ” first met at Reykjavik. ” 1874. First Constitution granted to the island on the date of its Millenary after Ingólf’s settlement.

[112] _i.e._, Land-nim-(Germ. nehmen, “Corporal Nym,” and modern slang, “to nim”) book.

[113] Cointius Annal. Benedict, tom. viii., et Bollandus die 3 febr. in Comment. prævio ad vitam S. Anscharii, § xvii., Copenhagen, 1857.

[114] “The Apostle of the North,” a monk from the monastery of New Corvey, in Westphalia, who introduced Christianity to Denmark about A.D. 827.

[115] The words in italics are those quoted with variants by Pontanus, who, however, has added nothing to nor has he taken aught from the sense.

[116] Data est hæc bulla post annum 834, quamvis ab aliquibus et præsertim a Pontano in rebus Danicis eo anno adscribatur.

[117] Here, again, the question is simply, “Has the Bull been tampered with or not?” It would evidently be desirable to consult the earliest copies still extant, but unfortunately the author has no power of so doing at present. The Bull of Pope Nicholas V. (A.D. 1448) should also be carefully inspected. See p. 84.

[118] In p. 432 (loc. cit.) we are told that _Angrim Jonas_ is “erroneously call’d _Arngrim_ by some”--it need hardly be said that the real name is Arngrímr Jónsson.

[119] Popular history, it has been seen, attributes the exploration to Eirikr Rauð (Eric the Red) in A.D. 982, some five centuries before the days of Columbus. Captain Graah, of whom more presently, speaks of a papal Bull by Nicholas V., who in A.D. 1448 declares Christianity in Greenland to date from 600 years back, thus removing the colonisation to A.D. 848. We have ample materials for determining the exact limits of the Northmen’s explorations by their precising the length of the day. For instance, at Vínland the sun at the winter solstice was above the horizon from Dagmál (7.30 A.M.) to Eykt (4.30 P.M.), which gives nine hours = N. lat. 41°.

[120] The Dictionary (iii. 780) gives forty-nine Keltic names in the Landnámabók only, neglecting the Orkneyinga, or Iarla, Saga, and the Njála.

[121] Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín remarks: “The large number of Irish settlers in Iceland after Ingólf do not prove anything concerning a previous settlement. No one denies that Iceland was visited by the Irish previous to the Norwegian discovery. No proofs, however, have been as yet brought forward to show that a settlement was made more extensive than that spoken of in Landnámabók, and by Ari Fródi. The great bulk of the settlers were Norwegians; the rest were Danes, Swedes, and Irishmen.” (See Landnámabók; Lambert, Ἀρχαιονομία, fol. 137, p. 2; and Encyclopedie des Gens du Monde, vol. ii., p. 60.)

[122] Some foreigners erroneously write for Althingi, “Allthing,” which would be pronounced Atl-or Adl-thing. _Al_-is from _allr_, all, the highest possible degree, _e.g._, Al-máttigr, Almighty. _All_-is right or very, _e.g._, All-vitr, right clever (Cleasby). The following is a synopsis of the most important events in the history of this famous Diet:

A.D. 965. Reform (bill) carried by Thord Gellir, who organised the courts and settled the political divisions of Iceland. ” 1004. Institution of the Fifth Court (of Appeal). ” 1024. Repudiation of the King of Norway’s attempt to annex Iceland. ” 1096. Tíund or tithes introduced. ” 1117-18. The laws codified, written down, and adopted by the Althing. This code was afterwards called Grágás. ” 1262-64. Submission to the King of Norway. ” 1272. Second written code (Járn-siða) introduced. ” 1280 (?). Third written code (Jóns-bók) introduced.

[123] Traces of some two hundred Things remain in the “Standing Stones” of Great Britain. Mr Dasent, from whose study of the Iceland republic (Introduction, etc., Burnt Njal, pp. li.-lxvii.) these lines are abridged, shows our _meeting_ to be “Mót-Thing,” a public gathering of the district freeholders: as _Husting_ is “House-Thing,” an assembly of householders. In Norway the Things were founded by Hákon, son of Harold Fair-hair, and the conquest over the Jarls was at once followed by the constitution.

[124] Sir Thomas Hungerford in 1377 was the first Speaker, and Sir John Busby in 1394 was the first Speaker formally presented for royal approval. These officials were the mouth-piece of the House, and by no means so called on the _lucus-a-non-lucendo_ principle.

[125] The word is liable to misapprehension. It is used of the place as well as of the body sitting there; of the Sacred Circle (Vé-bönd) as well as of the lawmen who occupied it. Moreover, under the Commonwealth, it was the legislative session that met on the Lög-berg; and after the union with Norway it was the public court of law at the Althing considerably modified. The term is also variously derived from Rètt, a fence, a sheep-fold; or from Að rètta lög, to right (or make right) the law (Cleasby). Moreover, the Lög-berg (Hill of Laws) of the Althing was called Thing-brekka (Parliament brink, or high place) at the local assemblies.

[126] Lög (_i.e._, “laws,” used only in the plural; from “lag,” a lay, layer, stratum) also signified the legal community or State.

[127] The Anglo-Saxon Leode, probably akin to June (ærra Liða) and July (æftera Liða); the Irish Fo-leith, and our modern “leet,” properly the law-court of the hundred. In the Saga times (tenth century) the Leið was a kind of county assembly; during the rule of the Grágás (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), the Leið was held where the Vár-Thing used to sit, in common with all the three Goðar of the Quarter (Sam-leið).

[128] The Northlanders, by a provincial arrangement which the central authority hardly recognised, claimed four instead of three judicial circles (Thing-sóknir). The reason was, that the heads of houses east of the Eyjafjörð and west of the Skagafjörð, whose Quadrant-Things lay in the middle of the Tetrad, refused to ride so far.

[129] Nat. A.D. 930; converted to Christianity, 998, and murdered, 1014. Cleasby derives “Fimtar” from “Fimt,” the heathen week, a pentad or five days; whilst the Swedish “Femt,” a court before which one has to appear a “fimt” from the citation, seems to have floated before the minds of the founders.

[130] Fat and ferocious Ólafr Helgi (Olaf II., or the Saint), when succeeding to the throne of Norway, doomed to death and slavery, to exile and confiscation, all who opposed the new faith. The blood of martyred pagans was not the seed of their Church; and persecution, vigorously carried out, took, as usual, wide effect. After his death at the battle of Stikklestad, he became the tutelar saint of Norway, the “Lamb” of the calendar. His remains ranked as relics in the ancient cathedral at Throndhjem, till Protestantism, or rather Lutheranism, under Gustavus Vasa (A.D. 1527), and Christian II. (1536), replaced Romanism in the Scandinavian peninsula. The Royal Order of Norway, founded in 1847 by the late king, Oscar I., bears his name. London has boasted of four “St Olaves;” and Tooley Street of the Tailors, according to Mr Peter Cunningham, notes the site of the first church. To retain due reverence for such a “Saint,” we must believe with Pliny (Epist., viii. 24): “Reverere gloriam veterem, et hanc ipsam senectutem, quæ in homine venerabilis, in urbibus sacra. Sit apud te honor antiquitati, sit ingentibus factis, _sit fabulis quoque_.”

[131] It was a classical dream which made Odin or Sigge (whence Sigtuna), and his followers the Æsir (minor gods), fly from Pompey in the days of Mithridates. It was a philological dream of Finn Magnússon’s which identified Bragi with Bramhá, and the ferocious and sanguinary Odin with the moral and holy Buddha, the prototype of the Christian exemplar. The casual resemblance to the Etruscan Tina has not been more fortunate. Some one well remarks that “a man born about A.D. 333, and dying seventy-eight years old (A.D. 411), would, in respect to time, perfectly represent the personage whom the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons call Odin and Woden, and who are the roots of their royal dynasties.”

[132] This fact was not unknown to Bishop Warburton and to Lord Herbert of Cherbury. In the Egyptian hymn to Phthah we read: “Praised be thy countenance, Ruler of the World!” Ausonius thus explains the multitude of synonyms:

“Ogygia ME Bacchum vocat; Osirin Ægyptus putat; Mystæ Phanacen nominant; Dionyson Indi existimant; Romana sacra Liberum; Arabica gens Adoneum; Lucianus Pantheum.”

Those who see in ancient myths the eternal contest of sunlight and darkness; of summer and winter, and, in the moral world, of intelligence and ignorance, will find strong confirmation in Eddaic poetry and prose.

[133] Properly written Thórr, a congener of the Mæso-Gothic Thunrs, the Thunder-god who named our Thursday. Whilst his golden-haired wife, Sif, who represented mother earth, with her sheaves of ripe grain, and the sanctity of wedlock and the family, is wholly forgotten, this terrigenous deity still lives, as we shall see, in modern Icelandic names. It is usually said that Iceland, following Norway, preferred Thórr, whilst the Danes paid the highest honours to Odin, and the Swedes to Freya (Venus), or rather to Freyr, her brother, the sun-god, who presided over the seasons and bestowed peace, fertility, and riches.

[134] The reader may remember, in the late Rev. Frederick Robertson’s Lectures to Working Men, a fine passage upon the same subject.

[135] Væringi (plur.-_jar_) _Warings_, or the name of the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon warriors serving as bodyguards to the Emperors of Constantinople.

[136] Of the monks proper (Icel. Múnkr, = μονὸς, monachus), only Benedictines were found in Iceland. They were accompanied by the regular canons of St Augustine. There were no “brothers” (fratres) or religious mendicants, as Dominicans and Franciscans; nor “regular clerks,” as Jesuits, Theatines, etc., who date since the sixteenth century; nor secular priests united in congregations like Oratorians and Lazarists.

[137] As will be seen, modern law recognises, or rather compels, an official arbitration before causes can be brought into court.

[138] The author would by no means make the invidious assertion that the Danish treatment of colonies was worse than that of other contemporary nations. On the contrary, in Africa, India, and the West Indian Islands, it has been a favourable contrast to most of the rest. But Europe in the fourteenth century, and in the ages which followed it, presents a melancholy contrast with the refined and civilised usage of her settlements by Republican and Imperial Rome.

[139] Of this process there were two forms, which began to be passed (circa) A.D. 1180. Bann, or Meira Bann was E. Major; Minna Bann was E. Minor, whilst the interdict was called For-boð, the German Verbot.

[140] This prudential reservation is the more necessary as most of our information comes from the enemy. Bishop Jón Ögmundsson had two wives, not at the same time, but one after another.

[141] “In the sixteenth century the Reformation was forced upon the people by the united kingdoms of Denmark and Norway; its progress was everywhere marked by blood, and even the Lutheran historian, Finn Jónsson, is unable to veil completely the atrocities which were committed. The venerable bishop of Hólar, Jón Arnason (_sic_, doubtless a clerical error), the last Catholic prelate, received the crown of martyrdom along with his two sons, uttering with his dying breath, ‘Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!’” Thus writes Baring-Gould (Introduction, xl.). Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín hereupon observes: “I must call attention to this quotation from Mr Baring-Gould regarding the introduction of the Reformation into Iceland. I cannot protest too strongly against it. _It is utterly false from beginning to end._ Every one who has the slightest acquaintance with the history of Iceland during the sixteenth century knows that Lutheranism was _not_ forced upon the Icelanders. The Reformation movement was only encouraged by the king of Denmark. Old men, Bishop Jón Arason among others, were permitted to retain their former faith if they were willing to leave others equally undisturbed in the exercises of their religion. This fact is corroborated by the bishop’s immediate descendants, who in everything glorified their ancestor as a martyr. Further, it cannot be shown that a single person lost his life in Iceland in connection with the introduction of the Reformation. The quarrel which led to the death of the bishop and his two sons arose from a dispute about the sale and occupation of a farm in the west. Bishop Jón Arason was an exact counterpart of the chiefs of the Sturlunga times; he delighted to ride about the island with hundreds of followers, and to engage in fights and broils with every one who had any property to lose. That it was not religious zeal that devoured him or his sons may be seen from the fact, that in a letter to the chancellor of the king of Denmark (dated 10th August 1550) they say that ‘their father the bishop, as well as themselves, are ready to keep the holy Evangelium, as His Majesty has ordered it to be preached everywhere in Iceland.’ There is all probability that they would have come to an untimely end even if there had been no Reformation. The king had indeed ordered their arrest as disturbers of the public peace. He did not, however, order their execution. The responsibility for that act must rest upon the Icelanders who seized them, and mistrusted their ability to keep them in safe custody until they could be brought before the proper tribunal. So far from anybody losing his life through the introduction of the Reformation, no one was even deprived of his liberty for a single hour except by Bishop Arason and his sons. I hope it was through crass ignorance only that Mr Baring-Gould penned such an extraordinary statement as the one quoted. Or is he able to name the people who suffered during the introduction of the Reformation, and to show trustworthy documents that they did thus suffer?”

[142] Charges of national ignorance are favourites with the ignorant, and unhappily not only with them: the analphabetic state of Spain is pressed into active service by the English home littérateur, especially of the Evangelical or Low Church school. It sounds strange to one who has often met upon the outer bridle-paths men mounted on their mules, and diligently reading books and newspapers. And the superior civilisation of the Latin race is hardly to be measured by the three “R’s,” or by similar mechanical appliances.

[143] The document is quoted _in extenso_ by Henderson (ii. 164-166), and by Baring-Gould (Introduction, pp. xlv., xlvi.).

[144] The Icelanders’ view of the connection between their country and Denmark is simply this: They declare the union, dating from 1264, and renewed in 1380, to be personal, not real, and limited to both countries being under the same king. The Rigsdag cannot therefore legislate for the Althing, and the constitutional law of Denmark has never become that of Iceland. They consequently demand that the Althing should have legislative and not mere counselling powers; that it should sanction in the island the laws proposed by the Danes; and that the minister who advises the Crown in Icelandic matters should be responsible to this Diet. On the other hand, Denmark denies the validity of mediæval treaties, the relations of the mother country and her dependency having been completely altered by historical events; consequently Iceland is now an integral and inseparable part of the Danish kingdom, and the laws of Denmark must be valid in Iceland as in the other colonies. Iceland, they say, cannot claim any self-rule as a right; still, it may be desirable, on account of their peculiar circumstances, to allow the Icelanders a voice in the management of their own affairs, subject, however, to the supervision and consent of the Rigsdag and the Home Government.

[145] It is popularly asserted that the Danish Government contributes $30,000 per annum for the support of Iceland. Upon this subject, see note at end of the present section.

[146] The author tried in vain to see the wording of the “little bill,” and was assured that it had not been printed. It appeared in the _Allgemeine Zeitung_, Nos. 66, 84, 85, 101, and 102, of the 7th, 25th, and 26th March, and 11th and 12th April 1870. The article is entitled “Island und Dänemark,” and is written by the historian Professor Konrad Maurer of Munich. See note at end.

[147] _Cela va sans dire_; for many years the island has been too poor to pay for the expenses of governing it. But see note at end of section.

[148] Hr Eirikr Magnússon in the _Standard_ of December 1, 1872, et seq.

[149] It can be proved that the different sums paid into the Danish treasury by the various companies who rented the trade with Iceland from time to time (from 1602 to 1722) amounted at least to $2,000,000, and the revenue of Iceland has never been credited with this sum.

[150]

The degree of longitude in N. lat. 63° measures 2770·1 feet. ” ” ” 64° ” 2674·9 “ ” ” ” 65° ” 2578·9 “ ” ” ” 66° ” 2432·1 “ ” ” ” 67° ” 2384·6 “ instead of 6082 at the Equator.

[151] Sir George S. Mackenzie makes the desert tracts of inner Iceland to number 40,000 square miles, a figure which still deforms Lyell’s admirable Principles of Geology, 11th edit., vol ii., p. 454. Mr Vice-Consul Crowe reduces the total area to 29,440 square miles (geog.), of which two-thirds are upwards of 1000 feet above sea-level, and only 4288 square geographical miles are covered with perpetual snow, whose line begins between 2000 and 3500 feet.

[152] The proportion of “boe,” where barley can be cultivated in the Færoes, was, till very lately, 1:60 of outfield or pasture.

[153] The day is past when the “determinate lines of fracture,” which resembled the empirical parallelism and the pentagonal networks of mountains, connected Hekla with Etna--yet it was an improvement upon the theory which made both of them mouths of the Inferno. Evidence to the latter purport has been given in our law-courts. The earthquake district of Iceland was popularly supposed to include Great Britain, Northern France, Denmark, Scandinavia, and Greenland--regions of the most diversified formation. The theory seemed to repose for base upon isolated cases of simultaneity, possibly coincidents. But, as Dr Lauder Lindsay remarks, contemporaneity would suggest a vast extension of these limits. The (Lisbon) earthquake of 1755, for instance, extended from Barbary to Iceland, from Persia to Santos in the Brazil. The earthquake of 1783 was equally damaging to Calabria and to Iceland. Even in 1872, there were, as has been shown, almost simultaneous movements in Syria, Naples, and Iceland.

[154] Hooker tells us to pronounce Jökull “yuckull,” which involves three distinct errors, especially in the double liquid, which becomes everywhere, except before a vowel, _dl_ or _tl_, like Popocatape_tl_. Iaki is a lump of ice, a congener of the Pers. [Illustration: Persian symbol], like our “ice,” although Adelung derives the Germ. Eis-jöcher from the Lat. Jugum, and translates “Excelsi Jökli” by “Montana Glacies.” Jökull in Icel. primarily means “icicle,” a sense now obsolete. The signification “glacier” was probably borrowed from the Norse country Hardanger, the only Norwegian county in which “Jökull” appears as a local name; and it was applied to the “Gletschers” of the Iceland colonies in Greenland. “The Jökull” _par excellence_ is Snæfellsjökull.

[155] The Icel. Stipti (Dan. Stift, and old Low Germ. Stigt) means a bishopric or ecclesiastical bailiwick. Hence Uno Von Troil translates Stiftamtmand by “bailiff of episcopal diocese,” and it gradually came to mean a civil governor. Cleasby informs us (sub voce) that both name and office are quite modern in Iceland.

[156] Further details concerning the governor-general will be found in the Journal.

[157] The Sýsla (_pl._ Sýslur, and in compounds Sýslu) is derived from Sýsl, “business”--að sýsla, “to be busy.” As a law term, it signifies any stewardship held from the king or bishop; in a geographical sense, it means a district, bailiwick, or prefecture. At present it answers to the Thing of the Icelandic Commonwealth (Cleasby).

[158] Not to be confounded with the Sókn, or parish proper. Cleasby is disposed to date the Rapes from the eleventh century, and he remarks that the district round the bishop’s seat at Skálholt is called “Hreppar,” showing that the house was the nucleus of the division.

[159] From pp. 703-909, the Skýrslur um Landshagi á Íslandi, vol. 4, Möller, Copenhagen, 1870, a portly octavo of 934 pages. Mr Longman’s list of the Sýslas (p. 34, Suggestions for the Exploration of Iceland) was quite correct, except in point of orthography, but it is no longer so.

[160] The Múla-Sýsla (“mull” county) was formerly divided into three parts, the northern, the central, and the southern, each with its Sýslumaðr. The present distribution dates from the year 1779.

[161] Hèrað (or Hierat) is the Scotch “heriot,” a tax paid to feudal lord in lieu of military service. In Icelandic the Hèrað is a geographical district generally, and is specially applied to the river-basin of the Skagafjörð (Cleasby).

[162] The sheriff does _not_ attend parish meetings, he has no schools to inspect, for there are none, in fact he has nothing to do with education at all, that being the business of the parish priest under the superintendence of the prófastr (dean) of the district.

[163] The name of this Icelandic code of laws, which must not be confounded with the Grágás of Norway, is variously explained from the grey binding or from being written with a grey goose-quill. It was adopted in Iceland in A.D. 1118, and it contained a Lex de ejusmodi mendicis (sturdy vagrants) impune castrandis. Some writers suppose that the Icelandic Commonwealth had written laws but no code. After the union with Norway the island received its first written code, the Iron-side, Járn-Síða (A.D. 1262-1272), and this was exchanged in A.D. 1272 for the Jónsbók, so termed from John the Lawyer who brought it from Norway. Uno Von Troil (p. 73) removes the date of the latter to A.D. 1272.

[164] Mr Dasent, Introduction to Diet, (xlviii.), remarks that the jury was never developed in Norway, and only struck faint root in the Danish and Swedish laws. When asserting the jury to be purely Scandinavian, the author speaks of Europe, neglecting the admirable Panchayat system which arose in the village republics of Hindostan, and a multitude of other similar institutions.

[165] Dillon notices forty-one women who had passed ninety: the number has now greatly fallen off. There is a further decline from the days of Olaus Magnus, who informs us that “the Icelanders, who, instead of bread, have fish bruised with a stone, live three hundred years.” The general longevity of Norway proves that the climates of the north, the _vagina gentium_ of Jornandes, have nothing adverse to human life. In Scotland the census of 1870 gave a total of twenty-six centagenarians--nine men and seventeen women.

[166] Innuit (Eskimo), like Illinois (from Illeni), means simply “a man”--a frequent tribal designation amongst savages. So Teuton and Deutsch, with the numberless derivations, are derived from Goth. Thiud, a people; Alemanni from “All-men,” and “German perhaps from Guerre-man” (Farrar, Families of Speech).

[167] The discovery of Uriconium and of Roman remains throughout England, and even in London, during the last few years, strongly suggests that the beauty of the English race is derived from a far greater intermixture of southern blood than was formerly suspected; and the racial baptism, repeated by the invasion of the Normans, must also have brought with it Gallo-Romans in considerable numbers. We can hardly doubt that the handsome peasantry of south-western Ireland is the produce of Spanish or Mediterranean innervation; and a comparison with the country people of Orotava in Tenerife, where the Irish have again mixed with the mingled Hispano-Guanche race, shows certain remarkable points of family likeness. On the other hand, except in certain parts of Great Britain, especially the Danelagh or Scandinavianised coasts and the counties occupied by the Angli and other Teutonic peoples, the English race remarkably differs from both its purer congeners, the homely Scandinavians and Germans. The general verdict of foreigners confirms its superior beauty, which, indeed, is evident to the most superficial observer.

[168] It appears probable that the reverence paid to women by the ancient Germans and Gauls arose from what Tacitus calls “some divine and prophetic quality resident in their women;” from the superstitious belief that the weaker sex was more subject to inspiration, divination, second sight, and other abnormal favours of the gods. The _Frauen-cultus_ of the present age, which in the United States has become an absurdity, would be the relic and survival of this pagan fancy.

[169] The author cannot say whether due care was taken when making these observations. Amongst Englishmen, when the thermometer held in the mouth exceeds 98°·5, there is suspicion of fever.

[170] Marquis Massimo d’Azeglio observed this fact among the paviours and the wine-carters, who form almost a separate caste of the Trans-Tiber population.

[171] Not always, as the common river-name Thvátt-á (wash or dip-water) proves.

[172] These satirical songs are known to the Greenlanders, who thus satisfy their malice, “preferring to revenge even than to prevent an injury.” Yet, the Icelanders have a proverb, “Let him beware, lest his tongue wind round his head.”

[173] Usually but erroneously translated “headlands,” instead of “head of men.”

[174] The popular assertion, “nothing can be more natural than that female chastity should be more prevalent in a northern than in a southern climate,” is simply a false deduction from insufficient facts. It is a subject far too extensive for a footnote; we may simply observe that the Scandinavians have never been distinguished for continence, nor are the northern more moral than the southern Slavs. In fact, the principal factor of feminine “virtue” seems to be race not climate.

[175] “To go by the way of the rock” was the old pagan euphuism for self-destruction; and the modern Hindú, as the Girnár Cliff shows, preserves the practice of “Altestupor” and “Odin’s Hall.” Suicide is now, like the duello, extinct, and the few cases recorded in late history are looked upon as phenomena. We remark the same rarity of self-destruction both in Scotland and Ireland, a wonderful contrast to England, which, again, despite its ill-fame, shows favourably in this matter by the side of France.

[176] The reader has only to remember how much of Britain was Danish to understand the Snorra-Edda’s express statement about Icelanders and Englishmen speaking the same tongue, “Vèr erum einnar tungu;” and Bartolin (Antiquitates Danicæ), “Eademque lingua (Norwegica seu Septentrionalis) usurpabatur per Saxonicum, Daniam, Sueciam, Norvegiam, et partem Angliæ aliquam.”

[177] Their extensive travels gave them peculiar names for peoples and places, which are often somewhat puzzling. “Thýskr,” a German, and Gerzkr, a Russian, are easy; but Samverskt (a Samaritan) is not so plain. Thus, also, we have “Enea” for Europe; “Hvítármannaland,” or white man’s land, and “Irland et mikla,” Ireland the Great (the Irlanda el Kabíreh of Edrisi in the twelfth century), for South America; “Suðurálfa” (_i.e._, southern half), for Africa; “Great Sweden” for Eastern Russia; “Svalbarði” (discovered 1194), for Scoresby’s Liverpool Coast (?); “Bjarmaland” for Permia, the land beyond the North Cape; “Sætt” for Sidon; “Njörfa-fjörð “for the Straits of “Gib;” Há-sterun for Hastings; and “Katanes” (boat naze), for Caithness. Some names are of ethnological value; for instance, “Bretland” for Wales; while Vendill or Vandill, the northern part of Jutland, preserves the name of the Vandals and the origin of Andalusia; and Garða-riki or Garða-veldi, the empire of the Garðar or Castella, tells us how the Russian empire was founded. So Suðr-menn (Germans) opposed to Northmen (Norðmenn), preserves the tradition of original consanguinity. Others are useless complications, as Engils-nes, the Morea, and Ægisif (Ἁγία Σοφία). The travestied names of persons are sometimes interesting, _e.g._, Elli-Sif (Scot. Elspeth) is Elizabeth, probably confounded like Ægisif, with Sif, the golden-haired wife of Thor, who lives in our gos-_sip_. Icelanders are not answerable for the mistake so general amongst foreigners which makes Níðar-óss (Oyce or ostium of the Nið River) an _alias_ of Throndhjem, of old Thrándheimr, when it is the name of the ancient city occupying the position of the present town. The “Antiquités de l’Orient” (par C. C. Rafn, Copenhagen, 1856) well shows how Icelandic names were applied to the Byzantine empire, _e.g._, Ἐσσουπῆ (_ei sofa_, not to sleep), given to the first bar of the Dnieper; Οὐλξορσὶ (Hólm-fors or islet-force) to the second, and so forth.

[178] “This assertion of travellers never had any foundation in fact,” says Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín, yet it is quoted by Henderson, the least imaginative, and, in such matters, the most trustworthy of men; and the Icelandic proverb says, “One’s own home is the best home.”

[179] As every traveller, from Uno Von Troil downwards, has given a plan and sketch of the Bær, the reader need not be troubled with them. The group of buildings composing the actual homestead is invariably built in a row: the front (Hús-bust) faces south, towards the sea or the river, if in a valley, and the back is turned to the sheltering mountain. The strip of flagged pavement along the front is called “Stétt;” the open space before it, “Hlað;” the buildings are parted by a lane (Sund); the approach is termed “Geilar” or “Tröð,” and the whole is surrounded by the Húsa-garðr, a dry-stone dyke.

The Norse Skáli, or Hall of classical days, whose rude and barbarous magnificence was the result of successful piracy tempered by traffic, has clean vanished--there is not a trace of one upon the island. A ground-plan, section, and elevation, are given in Mr Dasent’s “Burnt Njal,” but it is hard to say how much of it came from the fertile brain of the artist, Mr Sigurðr Guðmundsson. It was probably about as “desirable” a “residence” as the old Welsh manor-house, with its stagnant moat and its banks or walls of earth.

[180] The author well remembers that at Hyderabad, in Sind, only one palace had the luxury of glass, when we first occupied the city.

[181] Sótt is applied to physical, Sút to mental, sickness.

[182] More will be said concerning the several varieties of oxalis, which the people now seem to despise. Both wood-sorrel and meadow-sweet (_Spiræa_) were used by the poor of Ireland to heal ulcers (Beddoes, p. 47, on the Medical Use and Production of Factitious Airs), Uno Von Troil (p. 108) gives a long list of the popular anti-scorbutics.

[183] Of course the first sibilant, the sign of possession, is not used when the noun is otherwise declined. For instance, Jón Arason, often written by foreigners Aræson, is the son of Are, whose oblique case is Ara; yet there are popular exceptions, _e.g._, Bjarnarson (pron. Bjatnarsonj, son of Björn, is vulgarly pronounced, and even written, Björnsson.

[184] Thus the islanders preserve the memory of a “beautiful fiend,” one amongst many, who, after a very human fashion, began life as a coquette, and ended it as a _dévote_, being the first to learn psalm-singing, and to take the veil in the new convent. This hyperborean Ninon de L’Enclos deserves forgiveness for one of the cleverest sayings uttered by woman--a revelation of its kind. When asked which of her half-a-dozen lovers and husbands she preferred, her wise and witty answer was, “Theim var ek verst, er ek unnti mest”--“Whom I treated worst, him I loved most;” alluding to Kjartan Olafsson, murdered by her behest. In old days, Gudrún and John answered to the “M. or N.” of our Catechism, and to “those famous fictions of English law, John Doe and Richard Roe.”

[185] This is probably a relic of early ages, when “Maria” was a name too much revered for general use.

[186] Yet the Polygamia Triumphatrix (Liseri) of Lund, A.D. 1682, was publicly burned at Stockholm.

[187] We may add, Paris, 23; Berlin, 25; Panama, 26; Bombay, 27; New York, 28; Glasgow, 34; Madras, 35; Vienna, 36; and Rome the same, if not more.

[188] Thus Skyr is a congener of the Persian “Shír” and of the Slav Sir (cheese). The first stage is the “run-milk,” the second is the “hung-milk” (because suspended in a bag) of the Shetland Islands. Everywhere it is differently turned; by sour whey in Iceland, by buttermilk in Scotland, and by rennet and various plants in Asia and Africa. No milk-drinking nation drinks, as a rule, fresh milk. The Icelanders want the manifold preparations known to the Scoto-Scandinavian islands.

[189] Dr (afterwards Sir Henry) Holland introduced, or rather first brought, the vaccine virus.

[190] From Lík, Germ. Leiche, Eng. Lych, as in lych-gate, and Thrá, a throe or pang. Hold is flesh.

[191] This, like other forms of gout, certainly depends much upon the popular beverage. In England we find it amongst the beer-drinking poorer classes: Padua, the author was informed by the celebrated Dr Pinalli, does not produce a single case even to lecture upon.

[192] Thýðverjaland, or Thjóðverjaland, is Teuton-land, Germany, the adjectival forms being Thýðverskr, Thýzkr, and Thýeskr. Icelandic here has evidently borrowed from the Gothic Thjuth, the German Diutisc (Diutisch or Tiusch), the low Latin Theotiscus, and the modern Teutsch or Deutsch, through traders in the eleventh or twelfth century (Cleasby). But Rafn (Antiquités de l’Orient, p. xlix.) quotes the Roman de Rou of Robert Wace:

“Cosne sont en thioiz et en normant parler,”

to show that the two terms were applied to a single tongue. From the old root come the Italian Tedesco and the English “Dutch,” which the vulgar in the United States still persistently apply to Germans. Schöning (p. 310, Copenhagen, 1777) and Laing (Heimskringla, iii. 349) confused Thýzkr with “Turkish!”

[193] For a full account of the ancient dietary as prescribed by law in 1789, see Baring-Gould, p. 29. The items are meat and peas; sausages cold and warm; meat, broth, and soup; haddock and flounder; stock fish and butter (“the staff of life”); skyr (not curd) and cold milk; meal-grout, buckwheat-porridge, and barley-water grout with milk and butter.

[194] Ölmusa or Almusa is the Greek Ἐλεημοσύνη, the German Almosen, and the English Alms (Cleasby).

[195] He died November 2, 1872.

[196] The author is aware that a student who reads Greek and Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, French, German, and English, will find almost all the Talmud, certainly all the valuable parts, in translation at the library of the British Museum. But, unhappily, British Museums do not exist everywhere. Till the constitutional days of Italy the five Jewish Synagogues at Rome were not allowed to own copies of this vast repertory of Hebrew lore.

[197] If English, as appears likely, is to become the cosmopolitan language of commerce, it will have to borrow from Chinese as much monosyllable and as little inflection as possible. The Japanese have already commenced the systematic process of “pidgeoning,” which for centuries has been used on the West African Coast, in Jamaica, and, in fact, throughout tropical England, Hindostan alone excepted.

[198] The dialects vary so much that we can hardly speak of modern Greek. The only approach to it is the bastard, half-classical jargon, almost confined to the professors and the λογιώτατοι of the capital and chief towns. Worse still, all the Romaic grammars and dictionaries are devoted to teaching a tongue which no illiterate person speaks, ever spoke, or ever, it is to be hoped, will speak. Except by actual travel it is hardly possible to learn the charmingly _naïve_ dialects of the peasantry.

[199] The two cathedrals of Catholic days were burnt: their successors were humble buildings; that of Skálholt was a wooden barn; the building at Hólar was, like the Viðey church, of stone, a rare thing outside Reykjavik.

[200] Bishop Pètursson (299-305) supplies a “Specification” of all the priesthoods and their revenues in the island.

[201] Gullbringu is the Sýsla which contains Reykjavik; but the cathedral town is, of course, under a separate jurisdiction.

[202] Bóndi (of old, Búandi and Bóandi), _plur._ Buéndr or Bóendr (Germ. Bauer, Eng. Hus-band) included all the owners of landed property and householders (Bú), from the petty freeholder to the franklin, especially the class represented by our yeomen and the “statesmen” of Cumberland and Westmoreland. It is still opposed in Iceland to the “klerkar” (clergy), to the knights, to the barons (Hersir-or Lendir-menn), and to the royal officers (hirð). In more despotic Norway and Denmark, “bóndi” became a word of contempt for the lower classes; and in modern Danish, Bönder means plebs, a boor. Bú, from að búa, to build, to inhabit, is the household and stores, opposed to Bær, the house (Cleasby).

[203] In 1873, no less than 4385 “livings” in the Church of England were under £200 per annum: of these, 1211 were under £100; 1596 ranged between £100 and £150; and 1578 from £150 to £200. Measures have lately been taken to abate this scandal, which pays less for the “cure of souls” than for the care of stables.

[204] The traveller cannot but think that our scientific political economists are apt, in outlying countries, to neglect the first rule of taxation, namely, to avoid imposing novelties, and to levy imposts with which the people are accustomed. Thus India willingly contributes salt and capitation taxes, and especially Nazaránah, or legacy duties, whilst she hates the name of income-tax. No one will deny that the two former are objectionable for a host of reasons, but the question is, whether they are less injurious than those which lead to the many evils engendered by chronic discontent.

[205] The system of hundreds will be discussed when treating of taxation. Suffice it here to say that in modern Iceland, as in England of former times, the value of land tenure was estimated not by extent, but by produce. Indeed, superficial land-measures, such as the “mark” of the Færoes (=32,500 square English feet), are unknown to the island.

[206] It should be remembered that “Heimili” (households, families) are quite different from “Jarðir” (farms); and the two must not be confounded. The number of the former is 9306, of the latter 4357.

[207] In 1872 contested elections were almost unknown; at least only one was quoted, and the candidate had learned the practice in England. The position of Al-thíngis-maðr was also an object of scanty ambition except to those who required the small salary, or who had a political theory to work out. The assertion in the text is denied by Icelanders; but the author repeatedly heard it made by Danes and other foreigners settled in the island--at any rate, we may expect to see it realised by the new constitution. Knowledge is power in Iceland as elsewhere, and the numbers of the priesthood secure their influence, whilst the physicians and lawyers are too few to be of much account.

[208] The English Midwife means “with-wife,” from the Icel. “Með,” the German Mit.

[209] So Styria and Istria boast of a “Kohl-fuchs,” so termed from his coal-black waistcoat.

[210] May not the idea have arisen from a confusion of “Tó,” a grass-tuft, with “Tóa,” or “Tófa,” a tod? The older name, Mel-rakki, is derived from burrowing in the sand.

[211] Uno Von Troil (p. 140) also mentions wild cats (Urðar-kettir, cats-o’-stone-heap) and rats.

[212] The Irish “town-land,” _i.e._, yard and meadow; Scotch “toun;” Cornish “town;” Dutch. “tuyn,” a garden; and Germ. “tzaun.”

[213] This bird (_Charadrius pluvialis_, Icel. Hey-ló and Hey-lóa, the fem. Hey-láa commonly used, the hay-sandpiper), “quite the commonest in Iceland” (Baring-Gould, p. 411)--the snow-bunting being perhaps the commonest of the small birds--is black breasted in the breeding season, and afterwards becomes “golden.”

[214] Gaukr (mod. gickr) is a congener of the A. Sax. Gaec; the Irish Cuach (hence Mo-chuachin, “my little cuckoo!”); the Scotch Gowk; the German Gauch; the Danish Gick, and the Slav. Keuk or Kukavitsa: the Serbian legend makes it a sister calling upon a lost brother. The Index Vocum, etc. (Landnámabók, p. 486), explains it Cuculus.

[215] This is a lineal descendant from the ancient and venerable root which named the Aryan race, Ἄριοι, _i.e._, ploughers not pastors, and which produced Ar-atron, Ar-atrum; Bohemian, Or-adlo; Lithuanian, Ar-klas; Cornish, Ar-adar, and Welsh, Ar-ad, and which survives in our word to “ear.” The Arðr of the Sagas was probably heavier and bulkier than the Plógr, a late word of foreign stamp, which “our American cousins” will degrade to “plow.”

[216] This word, Melr (_plur._ Melar), wild oats or bent, also Mel-gras (whence Mel-rakki, the fox), must be distinguished from what the Dictionary, erroneously I think, makes its secondary sense, a sand-hill, dune, dene or link, overgrown with such grass, and a sandbank generally, even when bare. The question is, was the oat called from its sand-bed or _vice versâ_? For a description of this feature, see Chapter IX.

[217] Etymologically, Reynir is applied to a cousin, the rowan tree, or mountain ash (_Pyrus aucuparia_), especially sacred to Thor. Hence the Vikings were called ash-men, because they sat under the sacred ash, which defended them from the evil eye.

[218] Hooker (ii. 325) found a true rose, the _Rosa hibernica_, growing in the Seljaland, but only there. Thus it is not wholly wanting, as in the southern hemisphere.

[219] Further notices will occur in the Journal (Chap. V.) about this Surtar-brand (not “Surtur-brand”). Etymologically, it is from Surtr (a congener of “swarthy”) “the Black,” a fire-giant, who, coming from the south, will destroy the Odin-world, and Brandr, a firebrand. After the change of faith, this northern Ahriman or Set (Typhon) was ready to hand, and at once became the Semitico-Scandinavian “Devil.” Upon the same principle, the latter is known in Scotland as “Auld Sootie,” since the classical gamins gave horns and tail to Pluto, and the face of the great god Pan was blackened by the monks. The Surtshellir tunnel in western Iceland, famed for the atrocious “Cave-men” (outlaws), is also derived from the Surtr of Scandinavian mythology. The author did not visit it, but the descriptions and illustrations suggested the Umm Nírán in the lava formations of the Safá, near Damascus, noticed in “Unexplored Syria.”

[220] In Switzerland, also, the minimum of snow coincides with the last of July and early August.

[221] The indigenous Poas number twelve, and the Festucæ three

[222] Óðal is a congener of the German Edel and Adel, noble, as the “chiefs” of Scandinavian and Teutonic communities were the land-holders. Hence the mid. Lat. Allodium; and (Cleasby) “feudal” is fee-odal, odal held as a fee (Germ. _vieh_; Dutch, _vee_; pecunia, capitale) from the king: Dr Sullivan prefers _Feodum_, from Fuidhir, fugitives. Popularly, Udal, Allodium, prædium hereditarium, is opposed to feudal.

[223] The Icelandic Umboð are our Umboth-lands, formerly belonging to the bishop, and afterwards transferred to the Crown. Etymologically, the word means a charge or stewardship.

[224] See Section VI.

[225] The author’s statement made in the _Standard_ found objectors. Hr E. Magnússon impudently contradicted what he termed a _contradictio in adjecto_, apparently ignorant of the simple truth that neither logic nor Latin can affect facts and figures. It is amply confirmed by the Consular Report of 1870-71: “The stocks of domestic animals have shown a steady tendency to decrease, especially as regards the sheep flocks, which at times have been cruelly decimated by scab epidemics; the occasional failure of the grass crops exercises also a destructive influence on their herds and flocks generally, as they have no means at hand of substituting other fodder for the excellent wild pastures with which in ordinary years Nature supplies them so bounteously. These occasional epidemics and grass failures are bewailed by the Icelander as national calamities; but it is a question whether they may not prove to be the reverse, by opening his eyes to the necessity of devoting his energies and small capital to the better and more regular prosecution of the fisheries, which are boundless in extent, and less dependent on vicissitudes and seasons.”

[226] “Perhaps,” says Peirce (p. 29), “this is why the official statistics, with a sort of grim humour, number the ‘horned cattle’ at 23,713, while other authorities say there are 40,000 ‘cattle.’” He also quotes Dillon (p. 291) about four-horned and six-horned sheep--“quadricorns” are exceptional in Iceland as in most countries.

[227] More exactly the average yield of a one-year old is 1¼ lb.; of a two-year, 2½ lbs.; and of a three-year old, 3 lbs.

[228] Valued at a total of £2468, or about £5, 5s. a head. The prices will be considered in the course of the Journal.

[229] The steamer “Queen” in 1872 embarked 1030 head and the “Yarrow” 1414; these figures are given from the _Scotsman_. In 1873 the price had risen to £10 to £14, and the hire was a Danish dollar a day; thus the peasant was deprived of transport for himself and his goods.

[230] This is not the case with Norway, situated in the latitude of Iceland and Greenland, as the old rhyme shows:

“Sidst i Torri og först i Gio, Skal Sild og Hval være i Sio.”

“At the last of Torri (first moon after Christmas) and first of Gio (the second moon), The sillock (herring, _Clupea harengus_) and whale in the sea will show.”

Yet in Coxe’s time (late eighteenth century) the herring had disappeared from the shore, being found only in deep water; and Fortia (Travels in Sweden) tells us, that firing of guns was not allowed for fear of frightening the fickle fish.

[231] Concerning the fresh-water fishes, details will be found in the Journal.

[232] R. J. Walker, quoted by Peirce. Dr Carpenter and Professor Wyville Thomson, in the “Lightning,” made the remarkable discovery that sea-water at different depths, is of different temperatures--the older theory being that the sea was of a uniform temperature of 39° (F.).

[233] In intertropical and temperate latitudes _Phocæ_ and _Manatis_ devour the fetid marine vegetation which collects on river bars, chokes the mouths, and causes “Yellow Jack” to prevail from Florida to Rio de Janeiro.

[234] Of course the “finny brood” is not without its folk-lore. There is a variety of “troll-fish” which, being ominous and unlucky, are thrown overboard by their captors. The same takes place farther south, as we learn from Lucas Dobes (Færoe Reseratar, Copenhagen, 1673).

[235] “Gullbringusýsla (literally, Goldbreast county) derives its name from some hills called Gullbringur (Goldbreasts), about twelve English miles distant from Reykjavik. They were so called because tradition says that the old Viking Egill Skallagrímsson there buried the treasure given him by King Athelstan for his assistance at the battle of Brunenburgh” (Jón A. Hjaltalín). This derivation is far more probable than the popular version given in the text: for a third interpretation see the Journal, chap. ii.

[236] The three species on the west coast of Scotland are:

1. The Rawn, or Common Seal (_Phoca vitulina_), from five to six feet long; coat, tawny-white, spotted brownish-black on back and sides, with darker haslets and dusky-grey belly. The skin is of short bristly hair, but no fur.

2. The Tapraist, or Grey Seal (_Halichærus griseus_), somewhat larger than the former; the muzzle is black, and the coat dirty brown, looking silver-grey only when the sun strikes the recurved hair.

3. The Bodach, or Old Man (Halket, _Halichcærus_?), somewhat smaller than No. 1, and very easily tamed.

[237] Forelle is German and Danish; the general Icelandic name of trout is Silungr, but, as might be expected, the nomenclature is rich. Hooker notices this char (i. 97). The “suburtingur” of Baring-Gould (Appendix, 423), a fresh-water fish with pink-coloured flesh and sometimes weighing twenty pounds, does not appear in the Dictionary.

[238] A description and plate are found in Ólafsson.

[239] The word Vaðmál (pron. _Vathmowl_) is derived from Váð, Vóð, or Voð, stuff, cloth, weeds (_e.g._, widows’ “weeds”); and Mál, a measure--“stuff-measure,” because it was the standard of all value and payment before a coinage came into use (Cleasby). The form “Wadmal” will here be preserved, although England prefers “Wadmill,” _e.g._, in “Wadmill-till” for waggons.

[240] The following is the translation of the “Advertisement to mariners who enter the harbour of Reykjavik:”

“In pursuance of the laws, and under the punishment fixed by law, the following rules are to be attended to by the masters and crews of vessels that touch at the port of Reykjavik.

“1. As suspected, with regard to health, are considered all vessels (_a_) coming from countries or places where pestilential or epidemic diseases are found; (_b_) having merchandises on board, which are brought from such countries or places, or there packed up; (_c_) having had during the voyage, or having at the arrival, any sick person on board, whose disease can be considered as ill-natured or contagious; (_d_) having had, on the sea or near the land, communication with any vessel from suspected or infected places. Such vessels are bound, at the arrival to the harbour, to hoist a green flag, or, in default of such a one, their national flag on the main-top, with which they remain lying, until further order is given.

“As to other vessels, against whom there is no reason for suspicion of this kind, the masters thereof are peremptorily enjoined to land first at the bridge of Quarantine (distinguished by a green flag), to be submitted to the legal examination of the state of health of their crew, and to produce their bill of health, if they have any. Before this is done, nobody from the vessel is permitted to go on shore. The landing can take place from 8 o’clock A.M. to 8 o’clock P.M.

“2. It is the duty of the master, when arrived on shore, instantly to present himself in the Police Office for showing there his ship’s documents and clearances. Loading or unloading is not permitted before this is performed, and Icelandic maritime pass redeemed. Commerce on board with the inhabitants (‘speculant-trade’) is not permitted, except after a previous information thereof to the Policemaster.

“3. When any of the crew commits disorders on shore, it will be examined how far the master himself can be considered as responsible for such offences committed by his crew, especially when he has permitted them to remain on shore till late in the evening or night.

“4. In order that the breeding of the Eider ducks in the islands in the neighbourhood of the harbour (Viðey, Engey, etc.) shall not be disturbed, no firing of cannons, except in cases of distress, or as to men-of-war, in what the service exacts, is permitted within half-a-mile Danish (about two and a half miles English), or of guns within a quarter of a mile Danish (one and a quarter English) from the said islands. Nor is it permitted to go on shore on the uninhabited islands surrounding of near the harbour (Effersey, Akurey), without a special permission from the owner; hunting or disturbances of the breeding of the birds in these places are, accordingly to the laws concerned, punished with peculiar severity.

“5. It is prohibited to take ballast on the ground or beach belonging to the town, except in places pointed out by the Policemaster. Throwing overboard of the ballast may not at all take place on the harbour, and not in other places than such as will be pointed out by the police.

“6. Water to the use of mariners may only be taken in places pointed out by the police. As water money every vessel of the burthen of above forty tons pays for each voyage one rixdollar Danish; of less burthen, half a rixdollar.

“Given in the Police Office of Reykjavik, July 4, 1870, (Signed) A. THORSTEINSON.

“N.B.--This advertisement, which is delivered by the pilot, and from the Police Office, is made for the use of sailors. Wanting notion of it does not exempt from liability to punishment for offences, mentioned or not mentioned here, that are committed by mariners.”

[241] The “Napoleon book” (p. 364), gives a sketch of a “mine de criolithe:” one of the veins embedded in granite is eighty feet thick. Mr Walker (Peirce’s Report, p. 3) is mistaken in asserting that cryolite is found only in Greenland, but doubtless the largest known supplies are there, the development being due in great part to American (U.S.) enterprise. The natives used it only in the pulverised state--like quartz--to “lengthen out” their snuff; and similarly the “Red Indians” of the Brazil utilised their diamonds as counters. This double fluoride of sodium and aluminium, popularly called natural soda, is a mineral of ever increasing value; it is employed in the manufacture of soda and soda-salts, hydrofluoric acid, fine glass, and earthenware almost infrangible; the residue makes a flux (“Steven’s flux,” etc.) capital for the treatment of difficult metallic ores. Perhaps the chief use is in the manufacture of aluminium and its alloys, a noble metal which can be carried to white heat before it oxidises, and whose brilliancy is unaltered by sulphuretted hydrogen, water, acids, salts, and organic matter. The price till lately was about one-third that of silver, but increased cheapness has extended the use, especially in coinage and jewellery. Tenacious as silver, sonorous, easily melted and moulded, about as hard as soft iron, and one-third the weight of zinc; it is valuable for watch-cases, mirrors, spectacle-frames, opera and field glasses, hand-bells, pendulum-rods, small weights and balances, chemical apparatus, instruments of precision, and articles where lightness is required. It has also been converted into dinner services and cooking apparatus, in which, unlike tin and copper, it is absolutely harmless. The common form is _bronze d’aluminium_, with one of that metal to ten parts of copper; the tenacity of the alloy is about that of steel.

[242] This again is the popular assertion which has been strongly opposed by Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín (see note at end of Section III.). The reader, however, will observe that the patriotic Icelander confesses to the figures in the text, as matters now stand.

[243] The political sense of 120 franklins, several of which composed the English shire, is unknown to Iceland.

[244] The “Sharker,” moreover, pays a variable sum (say 24 skillings) per barrel of oil as an hospital tax, and this is now appropriated to the district physician.

[245] Compare the German Schatze and our Scot in Scot-free, Scot and Shot; Róma-skattr would be Peter’s Pence.

[246] The Icelandic word is Fógeti (low Lat. Vocatus, Germ. Vogtie, a bailiwick, hence “Landvogt” Gessler), which dates from the fourteenth century (Cleasby). It corresponds with the Fowd and Grand Fowd, chief magistrate of the Scoto-Scandinavian islands.

[247] In these pages “$” always refers to the rixdollar, which, like the Brazilian milreis, is half the milreis of Portugal or the dollar of the United States.

[248] In the plur. Aurar is supposed to be corrupted from Aurum, as the coins first known to Scandinavia were Roman and Byzantine, Saxon and English. It was applied to coinage opposed to baugr, gold or silver rings. Hence the phrase “Aurar ok óðal,” money and land. Ær or Ör was probably the name of a small coin; so the modern Swedish Öre is a coin worth less than a farthing, and the Norsk Ort (contracted from Örttog, Örtug, Ærtog, or Ertog) is the fifth part of a specie dollar (Cleasby). Upon the ancient money of Iceland the reader will consult Dr Dasent’s Burnt Njal, ii. 397.

[249] In 1872 it was not a legal tender.

[250] The German Loth and the corrupted Italian Lotto.

[251] Uno Von Troil (1770) makes the Lispund = 20 lbs. English, and adds the Vaett = 5 Lispunds, and the Kapal 12 to 15 Lispunds. Both Lispund and Bismer are now falling out of use in Iceland, where only the Danish pound is preserved. She should follow the example of Austria, and introduce the metrical system.

[252] The Danish mile is the long league; 15 being = 1° of latitude.

[253] Formerly there were only four--viz., Nos. 1, 3, 5, and 6--established by law of April 15, 1854, regulating the trade and navigation with Iceland.

[254] The following Danised names of the thirty-one privileged factories and trading places are given by Mr Vice-Consul Crowe (Report, 1865-66):

SOUTH QUADRANT.

1. Reykjavik (capital). 2. Havnefjord. 3. Keflavik. 4. Örebakke. 5. Vestmanns Islands. 6. Papö. 7. Landhussund.

NORTH QUADRANT.

8. Oefjord (called “a town”). 9. Skagerstrand. 10. Hofsós. 11. Seydafjord. 12. Husavik. 13. Ramforhavn. 14. Thorshavn. 15. Sandarok.

EAST QUADRANT.

16. Vapnafjord. 17. Seydisfjord. 18. Eskifjord. 19. Berufjord.

WEST QUADRANT.

20. Isafjord (called “a town”). 21. Stykkisholm. 22. Olafsvik. 23. Bûdenstad. 24. Bildal. 25. Dyrefjord. 26. Patriksfjord. 27. Flatey (island). 28. Reykjafjord. 29. Bordöre. 30. Straûmfjord. 31. Skeljavik.

[255] This gentleman is most obliging in giving all information about the steamer. No passport is required for Iceland.

[256] Upon these remarks Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín observes, “The case referred to is as follows: The Scotchman’s claim may have been good in point of Scotch law, but it was not in point of Icelandic law. That is the reason why the Procurators would not undertake it. He has therefore to blame the law, not the men. I know, as a fact, that both the Procurators of Reykjavik have conducted cases for foreigners, _e.g._, Messrs Henderson & Anderson against Icelanders. It would have been more questionable practice, although perhaps more lawyer-like, if they had induced the plaintiff to go on with the case, although they were sure that he would lose it. Foreigners often think they are wronged if a case, which is clear according to their own laws, breaks down according to foreign laws: Icelanders have gone through that experience in Scotland.”

[257] 1: Naturalisation is wisely made easy in Iceland. The foreigner swears allegiance, pays $2, and straightway becomes a citizen.

[258] In the secluded parts of the island fish and butter still form a currency of exceedingly variable value.

[259] No Cayenne is procurable, and those who ask for it will probably be served with curry powder in bottles, that do not suffice for a single dish, but cost one shilling.

[260] Coffee did not come into general use before the end of the eighteenth century; tea and tobacco are mentioned in the satirical poem, “Thagnarmál,” 1728, by Eggert Ólafsson, who died in 1768 (Cleasby).

[261] The Consular Report says, “1 lb. per annum for every man, woman, and child.”

[262] The Report has it that the duty of eight skillings per pot or quart has been laid upon ale, wine, and spirituous liquors, when imported in casks or hogsheads, and a duty of equal amount per one and a half pint, when imported in bottles, jars, or kegs.

[263] Iceland home-made butter is poor, white, full of hairs, and made in a way peculiarly unclean. It is mostly of ewes’ milk, that of the cow not sufficing. Travellers of course prefer the imported, but it is not always to be had at the shops. The favourite native form is “sour butter,” which, like the Ghi of Hindostan, lasts twenty years, though if salted it becomes rancid: it takes the place of salt and seasoning; it is considered to assist digestion, and it “diffuses an agreeable warmth over the stomach.” The climate demands such carbon-producing food, and “Fat have I never refused!” is a saying with the islanders.

[264] Flat fish, not being flat, is a misnomer for the sun-dried preparation which is unknown abroad, and unfit for European markets.

[265] This salt fish on the eastern coast is chiefly for home use, the catch being too late for curing, and dry weather being mostly wanting at that season.

[266] Only two pelts were sent in 1872.

[267] The merchant weighs the carcase when cold, melts the tallow, and pays a price varying according to the market, from fourteen skillings to a mark. The people have a strange idea that sheep falling into snow crevasses, and found a year or two afterwards, are naturally salted--a curious appendage to the “freezing upwards” theory.

[268] The other imports not accounted for are alum, drugs, ashes, ink, brushmakers’ work, cocoa, chocolate, ale in bottle and in cask (the latter, 11,776 lbs. in 1865), wine in bottle and cask (the latter, 23,137 lbs.), vinegar, essences, catechu and galls, indigo, dyestuffs and varnish, playing-cards, “galanterie wares,” glass ware, resin and gums, caps, stone china, pork and hams (2,480 lbs.), meat (2,279 lbs.), cork, buckwheat meal (880 lbs.), oatmeal (319 lbs.), spices (1,016 lbs.), coals (157 tons), cotton goods (62,484 lbs.), silk (11 lbs.), woollen goods (686 lbs.), block metal (786 lbs.), bar and hoop iron (63,486 lbs.), nails (23,441 lbs.), iron chain (404 lbs.), iron wares (33,770 lbs.), zinc in plates, hardware sundries (6,981 lbs.), cheese (1,736 lbs.), paper (6,210 lbs.), soap (12,225 lbs.), sago, etc. (811 lbs.), saltpetre (297 lbs.), prepared hides, and skins (4,508 lbs.), acids (309 lbs.), tea (918 lbs.), ropemakers’ work (22,770 lbs.), wood goods (14,294 cubic feet), worked woods (42,993 lbs.), vitriol (4,519 lbs.), and bar steel (1,441 lbs.).

[269] Here and there an eagle skin may be bought; and in country parts the quills of the royal bird are used as pens. The only species is the white-tailed Haliaetus (_H. albicilla_ or _F. leucocephalus_).

[270] Mr Jón A. Hjaltalín observes: “If by ‘home’ is meant the place where the songs were first made, this is undoubtedly correct, according to accepted theories; but then Norway would not then be their home any more than Iceland. On the other hand, it is indisputable that their last and only home was in Iceland, when they were nowhere else to be found. The allusions in the songs give no clue to their birthplace. You may find an Icelander of the present day singing of lions and elephants. And if they can do so now, why not in former times also?” The author would remark that the Elder Edda has evidently been preserved by memory from earlier ages, and that its origin must have been in Continental Scandinavia. It is rather the spirit of the poetry than the scattered allusions which suggests that much of it was not addressed to islanders. A comparison of the Völuspá with any Icelandic composition will explain what is here meant; and Mr Benjamin Thorpe seems to have been struck by the same idea.

[271] We find an Ulf’s-vatn in Iceland, but probably the name was given in memory of the old home, or as Úlfr was a proper name like Vuk in Slav, the first settler may have so christened it.

[272] Skáldr (Germ. Schalte) means a pole; and inasmuch as the Scald-pole (Skáld-stöng or Níð-stöng) was scored with charms and imprecations--as Martin Capella (fifth century) writes:

“Barbara fraxineis sculpatur runa tabellis;”--

so “pole” came to signify a libel. Hence Skáld may be akin to the Germ. Schelten, and the familiar English “Scold.” Afterwards it took the meaning of poetry in a good sense, and Skáldskapr (Skaldship) was applied to the form of verse, metre, flow, and diction (Cleasby). It is hardly necessary to observe that the word is of disputed origin, the five general derivations being Skalla (depilare), Skiael (wisdom = our “skill”), Skjall (narratic), Skal (sources), and Gala (to sing). “Hirðskáld” corresponds with our poet-laureate.

[273] Von Hammer counts 5744 Arabic terms for a camel.

[274] The total is 3060, but this would include the classics who have treated of Istria.

[275] Mr Lidderdale of the British Museum has lately catalogued its Icelandic books, and by another list of all those printed, shows what is wanted to perfect the national collection. The latter possesses some rare volumes which are not in the National Library of Copenhagen.

[276] The most noted of the old writers are the following: Arngrímr Jónsson published a variety of books on local subjects, Brevis Commentarius (1592), Anatome Blefkeniana (1612), Epistola Defensoria (1618), Apotribe Calumniæ (1622), Chrymogæa (1609-1630), Specimen Islandiæ (1643). In 1607 appeared the “Islandia, etc.” of Difmar Blefkens (Blefkenius). The author lived a year at “Haffnefiordt,” and then passed on to Greenland. He greatly scandalised the islanders by making them purify their skins and strengthen their gums like the Celtiberi of Strabo and Catullus, and the coquettes of rural France. In 1608, Ionr Boty printed his “Treatise of the Course from Iceland to Greenland” (Purchas, iii. 520). In 1644, La Peyrère wrote an “Account of Iceland” (Churchill, ii. 432), from which an extract has been made. In 1746, John Andersson, afterwards Burgomaster of Hamburgh, there published his “Nachrichten von Island,” which was translated into Danish and French. His statements were contradicted in 1750 by the Dane Niels Horrebow, “Tilforladeliga Efterretningar om Island med ett nytt Landkort, og 2 Aars Meteorologiska Observationer,” also translated into German and English.

The marking book of the last century was the “Introduction à l’Histoire de Dannemark,” par M. Mallet, à Copenh. 1755, 2 vols. 4to. It was reproduced in English and German. This pioneer of northern literature was born at Geneva, became French Professor at Copenhagen (1752), travelled in Norway and Sweden (1755), returned home and died (1762). The work is obsolete, but Mallet’s “Northern Antiquities,” edited by Bishop Percy, and supplemented by Mr I. A. Blackwell, would form a valuable item of Bohn’s Library (London, 1859), were it provided with a decent index, and purged of the blemishes which now dishonour it. Imagine the effect of such a note as this (p. 42): “The Himalaya, or Heavenly mountains; the Sanskrit, himala, corresponding to the M. Gothic himins; Alem. himil.... Engl., heaven.”

In 1766-67, M. de Kerguelen Tremarec voyaged over the North Sea, and published in 1772 his “Relation d’un Voyage dans la Mer du Nord.” In 1772, Uno Von Troil accompanied Sir J. Banks to Iceland, and wrote a most valuable series of twenty-five letters. They have been reproduced in many collections: the edition always referred to in these pages is the 4to of Robson, London, 1780, kindly given to the author by Mr Bernhard Quaritch. Another important book is that of Eggert Olafsson and Biarní Pállsson (usually Danised to Olafsen and Povelsen), “Reise igienem Island, with Zoega’s Botanical Observations,” 2 vols., Soroe, 1772, 4to; it was translated into German and into French, and a compendium of it, given in English, was largely quoted by Henderson. In 1772, Bishop Finn Jónsson (Finnus Johannæus), the learned author of the “Historia Ecclesiastica Islandiæ (vols. 3, Hafn., now very rare), treated of the “depopulation of Iceland by cold, volcanic eruptions, and famine.” Guðbrandus Thorlacius, Bishop of Hólar, also wrote a “Letter concerning the Ancient State of the Island.” In 1789, Mr (afterwards Sir) John Stanley addressed two “Letters” to Dr Black, which were printed in the “Transactions of the Koyal Society of Edinburgh.”

The various collections of “Voyages and Travels” contain many interesting notices of Iceland. The “Scoprimento dell’ Isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroenlanda, Estotilanda, and Icarea, fatto per due fratelli, M. Nicolò il Caualiere et M. Antonio, Libro Vno, col disegno di dette Isole,” appears in Ramusio, vol. ii.; in Purchas, iii.; and in Hakluyt, iii. Hakluyt, i., gives “King Arthur’s Voyage to Iceland” (A.D. 517), and King Malgo’s conquest (A.D. 580), by “Galfridus Monumentensis.” Also “A Briefe Commentary of the True State of Island” (or Iseland, both used indiscriminately), by Jonas Arngrim. Volume iii. reprints “A Voyage of the ships ‘Sunshine’ and ‘North Starre’ (of the fleet of Mr John Davis), to discover a Passage between Groenland and Iseland” (A.D. 1586). J. Harris (Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca; or, a Compleat Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1705 and 1748), in book ii., chap. ii., sec. 30, p. 489, et seq. (edition 1748), offers “A Voyage to the North, containing an Account of the Sea Coasts and Rivers of Norway ... and Iceland, etc.” (circa 1605), “extracted from the Journal of a Gentleman employed by the North Sea Company at Copenhagen.” “A Collection of Modern and Contemporary Voyages and Travels,” published by Sir R. Phillips (London, 1805), reprints (vol. ii.) “Travels in Iceland, performed by order of His Danish Majesty, etc., by Messrs Olafsen and Povelsen” (the Olafsson and Pállsson before alluded to), translated from the Danish, map and four plates. Kerr (“A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, etc.,” 1811-24) has a chapter (vol. i., sec. I, p. 4, et seq.) on the Discovery of Iceland by the Norwegians in the ninth century about A.D. 861. J. Laharpe (vol. xvi.) quotes Horrebow (1750), Anderson (1746), Jonas Arngrim, and “Flocco, a Norwegian pirate.” The “Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande,” etc., Leipzig, 1769 (pp. 1-63, map and plate), contains “Besondere Geschichte von Island.”

[277] In 1837 appeared the first southern attempt at a novel upon hyperborean subjects--“Han d’Islande,” which Jules Janin (Les Catacombes, i. 102) described as “Cette vive, passionée et grossière ébauche d’un homme qui avait Notre Dame de Paris dans la tête et les Orientales dans le cœur.” The great author’s mind must have been very young when he wrote it. This silly and childish farrago bears the same relation to “Notre Dame” as “Titus Andronicus” to the “Tempest” or to “Othello.” Han is an impossible savage, ever with a _tempête sous un crâne_. Ordener is a ridiculous Timon, and the sudden conversion of Schuhmacher to absurd benevolence is worthy of caricature-loving Dickens. With the exception of a few striking remarks, it shows more of fury and frenzy than of fine wit. It forcibly calls to mind the late Prosper Merimée’s harsh judgment of M. Victor Hugo as a poet: “He is all imagery. There is neither matter, nor solidity, nor common sense in his verse; he is a man who gets drunk on his own words, and who no longer takes the trouble of thinking.” And Han d’Islande explains how the austere old littérateur detected a vein of insanity in the greatest poet of the French Revival, the Romantic School which dates from 1830.

Nor amongst travellers can we reckon M. Jules Verne’s “Voyage au Centre de la Terre,” the least meritorious of the “terribly thrilling” and marvellously impossible series; its scene is chiefly below “Sneffles” (Snæfelljökull), a sniffling disguise, which seems to have been, but is not, invented in jest.

[278] M. Robert was the mineralogist, geologist, and botanist of the expedition; he received special directions from M. Adolphe Brogniart (Professor of Botany in the Museum of Natural History, Paris); he traversed the greater part of the island in 1835-36, and at his request Hr Vahl, a Danish botanist, who had lived long in Greenland, revised the published lists, especially Hooker’s, and drew up a fresh list, corrected to 1840. Since that time, Iceland has been visited by Mr Babington of Cambridge (1846), who also made collections. For others, see Section VII.

[279] The writer could have learned this only from Iceland information, and he should have been more cautious in listening to the islanders, especially when they were criticising what they consider a hostile book. On the other hand, Madame Pfeiffer has left an impression upon the reader that the clergy take money from travellers--which is certainly not the case now, and probably never was general.

[280] Amongst Icelandic travels we cannot include the valuable commercial papers, often alluded to in these pages--(1.) by Mr Vice-Consul Crowe, “Report on the Fisheries, Trade, and General Features of Iceland, for the years 1865-66;” and (2.) by Mr Consul Crowe, “On the Trade and Fisheries of Iceland, for the years 1870-71.” It is evident that the able author has not been in Iceland or he would not say “the _schools_ are excellent and well attended,” when there are absolutely no schools. It is to be regretted that the Foreign Office does not enable writers to correct their proof-sheets; we should then not have in a single page such blemishes as Skrid Sökler (Jöklar); Oræfa Tokull (Jökull); Odadahrann (Ódáða Hraun); and Kekjavik-cum-Keykjavik (for Reykjavik) repeated throughout the paper.

[281] Dr Hjaltalín has written many articles on sanitary matters and the natural history of Iceland, which have appeared in various periodicals, Icelandic, Danish, and English. He has also published for several years the “Heilbrigðistíðindi” (Sanitary News).

[282] Near the end of the paper we read, “Iceland was now (after union with Norway) governed as a colony;” this assertion, it is said, belongs not to the author but to the editor.

[283] Laing’s “Heimskringla” is a work of a very different kind, not translated from the original.

[284] The author can practically answer for its value. When travelling in 1872 he had only the first volume, and thus whilst tolerably acquainted with the words between A and the first half of H, he found it impossible, within given limits, to master the rest. In the “Days of Ignorance” it was necessary to learn Danish in order to use the Icelandic Dictionary. It is only to be hoped that the English-Icelandic half of the work will follow in due season, and doubtless some enterprising publisher, like Mr Trübner, will presently give us portable editions of both.

[285] Possibly a confusion with the pied crow (_C. Leucophæus_) of the Færoes. In Scandinavian mythology the raven was white, but, like the Hajar el Aswad of Mecca, it turned black in consequence of babbling and tale-bearing.

[286] He made an expedition to East Greenland in 1828-29; and his volume was translated by the late E. Gordon Macdougall, and published (London, Parker, 1837) by the Royal Geographical Society of Great Britain--a most sensible step. His determination that the East Bygð was on the west coast has of late been successfully questioned by Mr R. H. Major (Ocean Highways) through the 1507 edition of Ptolemy, the map of Van Keulen (circ. A.D. 1700), and the “Chorography” of the old Greenland colony, with sailing directions for reaching it from Iceland by Ivar Bardsen, steward of the colonial bishop. Captain Graah had denied the existence of Gunnbjörn’s Skerries, and so forfeited the guidance of Ivar Bardsen. His book, however, is a valuable study of hyperborean regions generally, and especially useful as a standard of comparison between Iceland and Greenland. In the latter we find the hot springs of Onnartok depositing silicious sinter, like the Geysir and Strokkr, whilst the unfinished church of Kakortok reminds us of Færoese Kirkjubæ.

[287] The fact is, it has become a party question. Hence strangers who, like Dr W. Lander Lindsay (p. 7, “On the Eruption, in May 1860, of the Kötlu-gjá Volcano, Iceland”), are otherwise employed than in making general inquiries, ignore the basis. When this great _opus_ was printed (1844), few countries in Europe had charts on such a scale, so accurately detailed, and so well engraved. Even at present it wants only the names of places being made more legible; it is still the standard work, for which seamen and landsmen have reason to be grateful, and it forms a solid foundation for future addition to all time. Mr Thorne (Ramsdale, Thorne, & Co.) kindly lent his copy to the author, who ungratefully kept it nearly three years.

[288] Every serious Icelandic traveller of the nineteenth century has alluded more or less to the career of the Rev. Jón Thorláksson, parish priest of Backa, who lived as best becomes a poet, in poverty, and who died in poverty, æt. seventy-five, in 1819. He thus laments his hard fate:

“Yes; Penury hath been my bride Since e’er I saw the world of men; And clasped me to her rugged breast These seventy winters all but twain: And if we separate here below, He only knows who made it so.”

His “living,” besides glebe and parish gifts, was £6 per annum, of which half was paid to an assistant (Henderson and Barrow); and he did not live to receive the £20 collected for him in England. He translated Pope’s Essay on Man, Klopstock’s Messiah, and Paradise Lost. The three first books of the latter were printed by the Islenzka Lærdómslista-fèlag (Icel. Lit. Society) before it was dissolved in 1796. The original MS. is deposited in the rooms of the Literary Fund, London.

[289] Forn-yrði, an old word, an archaism; hence Eddaic verse. We may illustrate its alliteration by Peirce Plowman:

“I _looked_ on my left half As the _Lady_ me taught, And was _ware_ of a _woman_ _Worthlyith_ clothed.”

Finn Magnússon and Rask thus converted Virgil into narrative verse:

“Arma virumque Cano, Trojæ Qui primus ab oris Italiam, Fato profugus, Lavinaque venit Littora,” etc.

[290] As will appear in the Journal, all the principal streams have ferries or some _succedanea_, and no Iceland guide is in the habit of exposing himself recklessly.

[291] Hunter & M’Donald of Leith sell sou’-westers for 2s.; outer and inner hose, at 3s. 6d. and 2s. 6d.; sailors’ trousers, for 10s.; stout oil coats, at 18s. 6d.; and fishermen’s mitts, at 1s. 3d. Foreman, also of Leith, supplies excellent boots for £2, 10s.

[292] A very young traveller, Mr John Milne, F.G.S., has thus taken the author to task: “Fancy yourself with forty horses, riding over snow bridges by the dozen.” Is it then necessary to explain that the ponies are intended for the Ódáða Hraun, a tract about the size of Devonshire? When Mr Watts started on his second expedition, he declared it was “essential that the party should not be less than six,” and he preferred eight, calculating that the expenses would not exceed £50 per man.

[293] “Ropeing” is not a new thing, as many Alpine travellers seem to think. Pállson, when ascending Öræfa Jökull (1794), used “a rope about ten fathoms in length,” and “left a distance of two fathoms” between himself and his two companions. The latter is the modern average, the extremes being nine and fifteen. The author never heard of Icelanders objecting to this precaution, but “G. H. C.,” who in August 1, 1874, inspected the Kötlu-gjá (_Field_, October 10, 1874), says that his two guides “apparently regarded such proceeding in the light of a capital joke, and, connecting the idea with that of horses (_í taumi_) at a sale, declared ‘they had never heard of a horse-fair on a Yokull.’”

[294] Every kind of snow requires its own shoe. Thus the Norwegian “skies” are very different from the Iceland skí, which resembles the Finn “öndrar,” or “andrar.” These articles are six, seven, and even twelve feet long, by five inches wide, in fact like large cask-staves. The front ends are a little bent up, and the sides are garnished with iron (saddlers’) D’s, through which leather thongs, or bands of willow-withes, are passed to secure the feet. Sometimes for facility of turning, one is made longer than the other, and the Lapps sole the right foot with hairy skin, so as to hold the snow in the back stroke. The alpenstock in Iceland is a bone handled staff, with a stout spike: the author never saw the stick shod with a wheel three inches broad, and safe against sinking, which is used on the Continent.

[295] One of the thermometers was broken on the way to Edinburgh, and, curious to say, it could not be repaired in the capital of Scotland. Professor C. Vogt prefers to the Alpine Sympiesometer, the _Barometre Compensée Metallique_ of M. Richard, Rue Fontaine du Roi, Paris: he used it in Iceland, and found it answer admirably.

[296] The _Saturday Review_ (December 14, 1872) informs its readers that the Danish mail packet runs from Leith--which it does not.

[297] From most parts of the world, too, even from Hungary and Fiume, the casks are sent back to the United States, not broken up, but in bulk, because the heavy freight pays well where labour cannot be bought.

[298] I need hardly remark that this was written before the glorious days of February 1874, when the English nation, centuries ahead of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, by one of the noblest constitutional revolutions known to its history, buried that _felo-de-se_, the Radical Cabinet, and pulled down its programme Disestablishment, Retrenchment, and Non-intervention, the latest modification of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, and--Death.

[299] We have seen that in Iceland the Lögberg, or Hill of Laws, was confined to the Althing.

[300] After many years of the “_quousque tandem?_” state of mind, my astonishment at the amount of legal murder authorised and sanctioned by authority in England, and my wonder that abuses so hideous did not become a public scandal, have been explained away by the sacrifices which the patriotic Mr Plimsoll found necessary before he could obtain a hearing. The manner in which his small inaccuracies of detail have been made to obscure the whole “palpitant question,” the counter-charges of sensationalism and ultra-philanthropy which have been brought to refute the main charge, and the notable worship of Mammon and vested abuses, are hardly encouraging to the optimist’s view of “progress.” But the day is now done, let us hope, when crews of “murdered men” can be sent to sea in floating coffins insured at thrice their value. The simplest preventive would be an order that every consul should report all flagrant cases, with the express understanding, however, that he should not be punished nor be made to suffer for doing his “unpleasant duty.”

[301] Found in St. Helier, and written “Helyer” in the Scoto-Scandinavian islands. Evidently the Icelandic Hellir (_plur._ Hellar), a cave, common in local words, _e.g._, Hellis-menn, the cave-men; it is akin to Hallr, a slope, a boulder, much used for proper names of men and women, as Hall-dór (Hall thor) and Hall-dóra (Cleasby).

[302] John Brand (A Brief Description of Orkney, etc., Edinburgh, 1701, Pinkerton, iii. 731) writes Dungisbie Head, and Duncan’s Bay. The Scandinavian form of Duncansbay Head is Dungalsnýpa.

[303] Pettlands Fjörð in Icelandic from Pight-land or Pict-land.

[304] For other interesting details see the Gróttasöngr, or Lay of Grótti.

[305] The old Cape Orcas, derived, as has been said, from Latin Orca, Gaelic Orcc or Orc, and Icelandic Orkn--“_Delphinus orca_,” a dog-seal--the addition of-_ey_, an isle, makes Orkney. This point is the Ptolemeian Tarbetum or “Taruedum, quod et Orcas promontorium, finis Scotiæ dicitur,” and unduly placed in N. lat. 60° 15´, and long. 31° 20´ (lib. i., cap. 3). The word derives from the Gaelic Tarbet, a drag, a portage, a haul-over, common names in Scoto-Scandinavia, and equivalent to the Icelandic Eið (aith). It lies only six miles from the nearest of the archipelago, which Pomponius Mela called Orcades, evidently a Roman corruption of the indigenous “Orkneyjar,” the Irish Innsi Orcc, and the Inis Torc of Ossian. Fordun’s “Scotichronicon” (ii. 2) calls the Orkneys “Insulæ Pomoniæ;” and Buchanan says, “Orcadum maxima multis veterum Pomona vocatur.” As _poma_ are not abundant there, the name has caused considerable argumentation. In the “Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord” (1845-49), and in the “Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland” (Edinburgh, Neill, 1852), Professor A. Munch, of Christiania, contributes an able paper, “Why is the Mainland of Orkney called Pomona?” Before his time Dr (D.D.) George Barry, in an excellent book, “History of the Orkney Islands” (London, Longmans, 1805) had derived Pomona from “pou,” small (query, “Bú,” a settlement, or “bol,” corrupted to “bull,” a house?), and Mon, Patria; also from the Norsk terms signifying “Great-land.” Professor Munch quotes Torfæus (Orcad., p. 5), “Pomona ... a Julio polyhistore Diutina appellatur.” Solinus Polyhistor, facetiously known as Plinii Simius, says of Thule (chap. xxv.), “Ab Orcadibus Thyle usque quinque dierum et noctium navigatio. Sed Thule larga et diutina pomona copiosa est” (Thule is a fertile country, and plentifully productive of long-lasting corn). He would read the evidently mutilated text, “Sed Thule larga et Diutina pomona copiosa est,” or “Sed Thule larga et diutina, Pomona copiosa est,” and he finds that “Diutina _ergò_ Pomona--ab esse ad posse valet consequentia.” But it is over ingenious to account by the error of a text for a popular term four hundred years old, _e.g._,

“Our rare Pomonia, which the natives style The Mainland.”

[306] To quote the Dean’s English, “it is part of a (Radical?) movement to help forward the obliteration of all trace of the derivation and history of words:” as such it may be highly recommended to the “Japs.” The Icelandic or pure Scandinavian form, simple and compound, is _ey_ (gen. and plur. _eyjar_); each vowel being pronounced distinct, and not confounded, as some foreigners do, with the German _ö_ or the French _eu_. _Ey_ is the Keltic “hy,” as found in the classical Hy Brazile, the mysterious island west of Galway, and so called during centuries before the real Brazil was discovered. Again the form appears in “Ireland’s Eye,” which Cockneys pronounce Ireland’s H’eye; the pure Irish form is _I_ (O’Brien’s Irish-English Dictionary, sub voce), or _aoi_, an island or region, which that learned writer derives (?) from the Hebrew “ai,” insula, regio, provincia. “The Norwegian _öy_, the Danish _öe_, the Swedish _ö_, the Anglo-Saxon _êg_ (-land), and the German _aue_, are found in ey-ot and Leas-ow, Chels-ea and Batters-ea; and whilst the Orkneys corrupt it wofully, we retain it pure in Cherts-ey, Aldern-ey, and Orkn-ey” (Cleasby). Munch (Ant. du Nord) has corrected the error of Webster, who derives “island” from _ea_ or _ey_, water (!), and _land_. It is simply _ey-land_, “terra insularis.”

[307] Properly Sand-eið, or Sand-aith, a sand-isthmus connecting two headlands.

[308] “Links,” from Lykkur, locked or closed fields.

[309] “Bismari” in Icelandic is a steelyard, and “bismara-pund” a kind of lb. The Norwegian Bismerpund is = 12 Skaalpunds (100:110 Eng. avoird.), and the Lispund is = 16 Skaalpunds. The Icelandic word is Lífspund, from Lifl, and = 18 lbs. Scots (Cleasby).

[310] Varangian, Icel. Væringi, from Várar, a pledge (al. Wehr, Vær, ware or active defence): the Væringjar of the Sagas, the Russian Varæger, the Βαράγγοι of Byzantine historians, and our Warings, popularly known through Gibbon and “Count Robert of Paris,” formed the Scandinavian bodyguard of the Eastern empire. These battle-axe men were at first Northmen from Kiew in A.D. 902, under the Emperor Alexis, and successively Danes, Norwegians, and Icelanders (Cleasby and Mallet: Mr Blackwall, note ‡, p. 193, attempts and fails to correct Gibbon). What possessed Mr A. Mounsey (Journal through the Caucasus and Persia) to derive “Feringi” (Frank) from Varangian?

[311] Popularly but erroneously derived from Kolbeinsey or Kaupmannsey, “Chapman’s Isle.”

[312] Mr Blackwall (p. 257) more modestly says the “first European.”

[313] “Peerie-folk” means the fairies, both words evidently congeners of the Persian Pari or Peri. Grimm, an excellent authority, derives the French Fée, the Provençal Fada, the Spanish Hada, and the Italian Fata, from the Latin Fatum--remarking that Fata and Fée have the same analogy as _nata_ and _née_, _amata_ and _aimée_. In connection with “Simmer” or “Sea,” “Peerie,” meaning little, is by some deduced from the French “petit;” in the Shetlands it is further emphasised to Peerie-weerie-winkie (of a foal, etc.).

[314] The ordinary runes, I need hardly say, have been shown by Rafn to be derived from archaic Greek; and probably from coins which found their way north during the first centuries of our era.

[315] Gen. Lim-rúnar (lim or limr being the limb of a tree opposed to the bole), which Cleasby explains as “a kind of magical runes.”

[316] “Hubby” is a loose robe, erroneously derived, like the Scotch Joop, the German Giup, the Italian Giubba and Giubbone, the French Jupe and Jupon, and the Slav Japungia, from the Norsk Hwipu. All these are simply corruptions of the Arabic “Jubbeh.”

[317] These Northmen left their handiwork even on the “Stones of Venice.” Readers may not be unwilling to see the legend upon the maneless and melancholy lion, the statue of Pentelic marble, ten feet high, once at the harbour mouth of the Piræus (Porto Leone), where the pedestal still stands, now fronting the arsenal, Venice, where, after the retreat from Greece, the Doge Morosini carried it in 1687. The hardly legible inscription on the right side of the animal is supposed to be, “Asmundr graved these runes united with Asgeir, Thorlief, Thórd, and Ívar, at the request of Haraldr Háfi (the Tall); although the Greeks, taking thought, forbade it.” It is supposed that this Harold was the same who had the promise of seven feet in English ground. The left flank and shoulder are less uncertain, and the legend reads as follows: “Hakun, united with Ulfr (Wolf) and Asmundr and Aurn (Örn), conquered this port. These men and Haraldr Háfi, on account of the uprising of the Greek people, imposed considerable fines. Dálkr remained (prisoner?) in remote regions. Egill fared with Ragnar to Rumania ... and Armenia.”

The inscriptions were first published in 1800 by Åkerblad, a Swedish savant; they have been frequently revised, and the last study is the “Inscription Runique du Pirée, interpretée par C. C. Rafn; et publiée par la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord,” Copenhagen, 1856.

[318] The old Norsk Megin-land, land of might, or mainland, is evidently, like the Scotch Mickle, connected with the Persian Mih or Mihin, great, powerful, but not, as Mr Blackwall conceives, with “miracle.” The classical name of the Orkney group, then numbering only seven, is Acmodæ in Pliny, iv. 16, and Hæmodæ in Mela, iii. 6. The Icelandic term is Hjaltland (pronounced _Zhatland_), hence Zetland, Hetland, and Shetland. Thus it still preserves the fame of old Hjalti, the Viking of the ninth century, who also survives in the modern “Sholto.” Munch suggests that Hjaltland, hilt-land, may have been given from a weapon dropped in it; so trivial were the names of olden Scandinavia: he also mentions the legend of Swordland, a great country now submerged, between Norway and Hjaltland, its hilt.

[319] In Scandinavian, Dynröst, “thundering roost,” from “að dynja,” to din; hence the Tyne and Dvina Rivers. The Icelandic Röst, or current, is the French Raz; that of “Petlandsfjörð” is especially celebrated. In the Orkneys “Roust” is a stormy sea caused by the meeting of tides; “Skail” (Icel. Skellr) is the dashing of surf upon the shore; “Skelder,” the washing of waves, is a common name for farm-houses near the beach; and “Swelchie,” which explains its own meaning, is the Icelandic Svelgr.

[320] Fit Fiall, _i.e._, “planities pinguis,” or, better still, Fitfulglahöfði, sea-fowl cape.

[321] An abstract printed in “Illustrations of Northern Antiquities,” one vol. 4to, Edinburgh, 1814; reprinted verbatim in “Northern Antiquities,” edited by Mr J. A. Blackwall, London, Bohn, 1859. In it we may note the origin of Norna the sibyl’s “improvisatory and enigmatical poetry.”

[322] Originally Brúsey, from Brúsi, a proper name.

[323] Skála-vegr, the way of the court-house.

[324] Also written Brough, meaning a round tower. The word is usually derived from the Gothic “berga,” to defend, but it has a far nobler origin. It is the Chaldee “burgadh,” the Arabic “burj,” the Armenian “pourc,” the Greek “πύργος,” and the Latin “burgus;” the Gothic “baurg,” the Mæso-Gothic “bairg,” and “borg,” a mountain; the Scandinavian “borg,” a fortress; the Armoric, Irish, and Welsh “burg,” also found in Teutonic and Saxon; the Anglo-Saxon “beorh” and “beorg,” a rampart, and “burh” or “bureg,” a castle; the Belgian “burg,” the Gaelic “burg,” the French “bourg,” the Italian “borgo,” the North British “burgh” and “burg,” as Edinburgh and Corrensburg; the Scoto-Scandinavian “brogh” or “broch,” with the guttural uncompounded, and even “borve,” as in Sianborve, and “burr,” as in Burraness; and, finally, the English “burg” and “burgh,” “borough” and “burrow.” Such are a few of its titles to antiquity and extent of domain.

[325] I am well aware of the difficulties, and especially of the expense, objected to condensing peat. But peat _au naturel_ can be burnt as the _mottes_ in France and Holland have been used for generations. And I am also aware of the immense interests wielded by the Coal League--surely these must sooner or later succumb to the public good. Lands without coal leagues find no difficulty in the operation. The two companies lately established at Oldenburg use a large flat-bottomed steamer, which opens a canal 20 feet broad and 6 deep at the rate of 10 to 12 feet per hour: the soil is heaped up on the banks, and is cut into brick-shape, after which mere drying makes it fit for fuel.

[326] After Australian diggers had asserted for years that gold would be found in Bute, a specimen was lately (1874) extracted from a vein of quartz which runs out into the sea below the Skeoch plantation.

[327] Jerome Cardan, travelling in Scotland (1552), remarked the popular fondness for the _Platanus_, and explains it thus: “I think they take a special delight in that tree, because its foliage is so like vine leaves.... ‘Tis like lovers, who delight in portraits when they can’t have the original.” Colonel Yule (Geograph. Mag., Sept. 1, 1874) asks whether these trees were the real plane (_P. Orientalis_) or the maple (_Acer pseudo-platanus_), commonly but erroneously so called in Scotland, and still more erroneously in England, “Sycamore.” Hence also, he observes, by propagation of error Eastern travellers translate the Persian “Chínár” (_Platanus_) by Sycamore.

[328] Especially “Shetland,” etc., by Robert Cowie, M. A., M. D. Edinburgh: Menzies, 1871. Will the author allow me to suggest that in his next edition of this valuable work--an exceptional guide-book, amusing as well as instructing--the medical part from page 56 to page 88, and especially Chapter XIV., should be placed in an appendix? At present it reminds me of a volume which I read with the liveliest interest, “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” regretting only that the order of the tales had not been systematically reversed. Dr Cowie has been kind enough, at my request, to draw up an account of the pre-historic collection at Lerwick, which will be found in the note at the end of this chapter.

Since these lines were written, the papers have informed me that Dr Cowie, after printing a second edition of his admirable guide-book, has passed from this world when in the prime of manhood.

[329] The number of these places of refuge shows the Shetlands in proto-historical times to have been densely peopled. I have made the same remark about the Istrian Castellieri.

[330] Etymological Glossary of the Shetland and Orkney Dialects, by Thomas Edmonston. Edinburgh, 1866.

[331] Hence the name of Malestrom or Moskoestrom.

[332] “Lappmark’s land-plague,” says Mr Shairp, author of “Up in North” (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872), is of three kinds:

1. Mygg, or long nose (_Culex pipiens_), the wretch of stinging bite and blasphemous song.

2. Knott (_C. reptans_), a villain that keeps close to the ground, and avoids horses.

3. Hya or Gnadd (_C. pulicaris_), the smallest of the family, but when it “sticks,” as the Swedes say, violent itching is the result.

[333] The fowl rope contained sixteen ox hides, and the seven pieces each measured eighty fathoms. Early in the present century it cost only $10.

[334] One of those in the Lerwick Museum was taken out of the peat-moss six feet beneath the surface.

[335] On some Remarkable Discoveries of Rude Stone Implements in Shetland, by Arthur Mitchell, F.S.A., from Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. vii, 1866-67.

[336] Dr Mitchell, paper supra cit.

[337] At Ephesus blue formed the background of enrichments and sculpture in relief, whilst brilliant reds and yellows were applied to the parts requiring greater prominence. The idea that red, green, and blue, are primitives, with yellow, sea-green, and pink for complements, is very modern and rather startling.

[338] He attributes (p. 49) the fire to crushed driftwood, but Adam of Bremen declares the ice to be so dry that it can burn.

[339] The Icelandic “fugl” is especially applied to the gull. “Fowl-isle” amongst the Scandinavians meant an isolated rock lying far out to sea, and supposed to represent a bird swimming.

[340] Raven--old German, Hraban; modern, Rabe; Icel. Hrafn (_pron._ Hrabn); Anglo-Saxon, Hræfn; Dan. Ravn; and Slav. Vran--is derived (says Max Müller, “Science of Languages,” Longmans, 1862) from the Sanskrit Rn or Krn, “to cry,” whence “raucus,” and other kindred words. Like the pigeon, the genus Corvus (Corax and Cornix) crops up in all mythology, even where least expected; witness the Hierocorax of Mithras and the marvellous changes by which Apollo and Athene became crows.

[341] The very word is Norsk, “leiðar-(Anglo-Saxon, lâd) steinn,” not “lapis viæ,” but leading stone (að leiða), or lode-stone; like lode-star and lodesman, “a pilot.” It is also called Sólar-steinn, or “sun-stone.”

[342] Cleasby derives it from Kúði or Kóð, the fry of trout and salmon.

[343] Several Icelanders (see Dr W. Lauder Lindsay) have visited the rift which engulphed Katla, the murderess and suicide; a name well known by the translation of Powell and Magnússon. “G. H. C.,” before quoted, who explored it in August 1874, after being misled by the map, found on the southern face “a deep circular indentation where black volcanic sand could be seen uncovered by snow and ice.” We can now explain by the usual method the glacier which, according to Professor Steenstrŭp, was torn from its moorings in 1721 by water within or below: evidently the heated ground melted the whole of the upper _calotte_ and caused the catastrophe. Other traces were concealed by the snow-fall which, consolidating into glacier-ice, accumulates annually twenty feet, and fourteen years have elapsed since the last eruption. The guides were surprised that “their natural foe should present phenomena of a character no more startling and tremendous. What had they expected to find? Perhaps a vast yawning gulf, over whose edge might be watched the spirit of Katla, whirling like a second Francesca di Rimini in the sulphurous depths below.” Yet Henderson could descry from Skaptafell “the aqua-igneous volcano _Kötlu-giá_, whose tremendously yawning crater was distinctly visible” (i. 264).

[344] In Iceland the reflection of field-ice is brightest, but yellow; new ice is grey, and drift-ice is purest white. The use of “blink” is not happy: Ross employs it in “ice-blink” to denote a cliff or barrier; others talk of land-blink, _i.e._, the reflection of the sky upon the earth.

[345] The English “tern” is from the Icel. Therna (_Sterna hirundo_).

[346] Hence “Lundy” in the Bristol Channel.

[347] Baring-Gould (pp. 418, 419) gives four kinds of skuas--_Catarrhactes_ (great skua), _Pomatorhinus_, _Parasiticus_ (Arctic skua), and _Buffoni_. He makes “Kjór” the Icel. name for No. 3: I heard it so applied, but the Dictionary gives “a sea-bird of the tern kind; Hill’s Sterna.” We find the family mentioned by Pigafetta, the circumnavigator (A.D. 1519-22), under the libellous name “Cagassela” or “Caca uccello,” and he himself oftentimes witnessed the practice which survives in the term Stercorarius. It is an Antarctic as well as an Arctic “pirate of the seas.”

[348] A term of daily use, derived from “að hrynja,” to flow, to stream down; its pronunciation (_Hroyn_) induces the facetious traveller to call it the “road to ruin,” and Henderson wrote as he spoke, Hroyn. “Gullbringu” is usually translated gold-bringing; but Cleasby, sub voc. “bringa,” derives the word differently, and makes “Gull-bringur” signify the Golden Slopes. In Sect. VII. of Introduction a third signification has been given.

[349] Hence the country word “Kaarl Cat,” for tom cat, still preserved in heraldry. The Icel. Karl is pronounced _Katl_ or _Kadl_.

[350] Farther south the Fulmar is called the Mollie-moke; hence the “mollie,” or mild orgie on broad northern whalers.

[351] The following is the whole text of the letter upon the “Expected Eruption of Mount Hecla” (which did not take place):

“MANSE OF ARBUTHNOTT, _July 2, 1872._

“SIR,--Will you permit me to add the following to your paragraph with the above heading in the _Scotsman_ of to-day? While doubling Cape Reikianess, the south-west promontory of Iceland, on the morning of Saturday, June 8, we saw a remarkable Geyser a few miles inland, shooting up water at regular intervals of about five minutes to a height of at least 100 feet. All on board who had ever heard of the Great Geyser, so graphically described by Madame Ida Pfeiffer and others, but which is sometimes so unpolite as to keep sightseers waiting two days before it favours them with an exhibition, were amazed at a spectacle so remarkable, and yet so unremarked by any who before us had visited Iceland.

“After attending service at the church of Reikiavik on Sunday, I did myself the honour to call upon the Bishop of Iceland, an excellent, courteous old gentleman, who, if he does not dwell, like the Psalmist, in a ‘house of cedar,’ dwells, like his flock, in a house of Norwegian fir. He could not speak English, but he spoke French well. To him I mentioned the phenomenon we had seen, believing that he was as likely as any one to know whether or not it was new. He told me that he knew the district well, but that there was no Geyser there at his last visit; that what we had seen, therefore, was quite new. In answer to my inquiry whether there had been any recent volcanic disturbance in the island, he informed me that there had been a violent earthquake in the northern region about the middle of April. This outburst of a new Geyser (which we observed in full play on our homeward voyage on Tuesday, June 11) and the earthquake in the north, seem premonitory of an eruption either of Hecla, or of some other of the other seven mountains which Keith Johnston, in his Physical Atlas, marks as active volcanoes. I hope we shall shortly have a description of any such occurrence, if it do take place, from the graphic pen of Captain Burton, whose society made our outward voyage a rare treat.--I am, etc.

“(Signed) R. M. SPENCE.”

[352] Reyk = reek (Kelt. Ruagh, Reâc, and Ruah, the German Rauch), seems to be a word common to the Aryan and Semitic families. Old philologists derive it from the Hebrew Ruach, Arab. Rúh or Ríh, wind, breath, mind, spirit. Spinoza, the Hebraist, translates, apparently with reason, “Ruach Elohim” (the Spirit of Elohim or Gods, Gen. i. 2) by “a strong wind.”

[353] “Eyjar” is often used of the Western Isles, Orkneys, Shetlands, and Soder or Suder (Suðr-ey, south isle, whence the diocese of Soder and Man). In south Iceland it is also applied to the Vestmannaeyjar.

[354] One of the earliest forms of armour-plating, the old defence still survives in the nettings of our bulwarks.

[355] English tautology. Skagi (in Shetland Scaw or Skaw, _e.g._, the Skaw of Unst) is a low cape opposed to Höfði, a high headland (Cleasby).

[356] Originally Örfiris-eye, which has been explained under Orfir of the Orkneys.

[357] Heimdall was the doorkeeper of the gods, who kills and is killed by Loki.

[358] I dismiss the “Iceland Revolution” in a few lines, for Baring-Gould (Introd. xlii.) has given a very complete account, borrowed from Hooker and Mackenzie.

[359] Reykjavíkr in the nominative sing, is an abstract linguistic fiction, from Vík (feminine), a bay, a wich (_e.g._, Greenwich). Travellers neglect the Icelandic termination, and even English literati omit the-_r_ or-_ur_ as superfluous and strictly correct only in the nominative, _e.g._, Leif for Leifr. From Vík, a bay, comes Víking, a baying-voyage, or seeking the shelter of bays, and Víkingr, a baying-voyager, or a voyager from the fjords. This word, sometimes written Vi-king in English, suggests a wrong etymology. Cleasby warns us that the termination-_wick_ or-_wich_ is Norsk only for maritime places, the inland “wicks” derive from the Latin _vicus_. Local names beginning with _Reyk_ are unknown to Scandinavians, and peculiar to Iceland where the pillars of steam must have struck the colonist’s eye.

[360] Taken at the cathedral. The longitude (G.) given by Norie is W. 21° 51´ 3´´, by Raper 21° 55´ 2´´; Norie gives the lat. 64° 9´ O”, Raper 64° 8´ 4´´. The variation of the compass is roughly 36° off Berufjörð; 35° 15´ off the eastern Jökull; and 45° off Reykjavik: it was in 1814 (Henderson, i. 250) “two points towards the west;” in 1840 (French charts) it was W. 43° 21´. M. Lottier (1838) made it 43° 14´; and in 1871 (Admiralty chart, by Captain Evans) it was 44°, still increasing at the rate of 5´ per annum. Consequently the people have two norths--north by compass and true north, the latter at Reykjavik fronting the mountain-block Akrafjall. The inclination (dip) of the magnetic needle (French chart of 1840) is 76° 45´. The vulgar _Etablissement du port_ (Hafenzeit, high water at full and change), French chart, is at 5h. Om.; and the maximum height of the tides 5m. 35 cent. The Admiralty tables give spring-tides a rise of 17½ feet and the neaps 13¼.

[361] The Dictionary translates it “home of the Thronds” (Thrændir).

[362] From “And,” opposite, and “Vegr,” an “opposite seat,” a “high seat.” In the old timbered hall the benches (bekkr) were ranged along the walls with the two seats of honour in the middle facing one another. The northern, fronting the sun, was called Öndvegi æðra, first or higher high-seat, reserved for the master, and the other was Úæðra, the lower or second, kept for the chief guest. In England the master and the mistress sitting opposite each other at table, may be a remnant of the old Scandinavian custom. The sides of the high seat were ornamented with uprights (öndugis súlur) carved with figures, such as a head of Thor: these posts were regarded with religious honour and were thrown into the sea as guides. When a man of rank died, the son, after all rites performed, solemnly sat in his father’s seat, as a sign of succession, but this was not done if the paternal murder remained unavenged (Cleasby).

[363] There is a plan of Reykjavik, but the size of the scale keeps it in MS. Baring-Gould and others give ground sketches, which are now obsolete.

[364] In Icel. Brú is a bridge in our sense of the word; Bryggja is a landing-place as well as a bridge.

[365] This hollow sound may be remarked even in the new town of Trieste, where a passing omnibus shakes the substantially-built stone houses. Such soil must be always the most dangerous in case of earthquakes, which are comparatively harmless on the adjacent hill-slopes.

[366] The word Völlr (plur. Vellir, and gen. pl. Valla) means a field, and is akin to the German Wald. It often occurs in the plural, _e.g._, Reyni-vellir (Rowan plains); and “Thing-valla,” the foreign way of writing, is properly Thingvellir.

[367] Tómr, empty, is the Scotch “toom.”

[368] I particularly remarked the beautiful shell, striped white and brick-red, the Hörpu-diskr, _Pecten Islandicus_, or Iceland clam. The krákuskel, or _Mytilus edulis_, is eaten by foxes.

[369] Native authorities differ as to the depth where frost extends. I heard a maximum of eight feet, even in the lowlands.

[370] The word Hjallr, the Færoese Kiadlur, is akin to Hjalli and Hilla (English hill), a shelf or ledge in the mountain-side, and hence a scaffold; the full term for the fish-shed is Fisk-hjallr (Cleasby).

[371] Henderson confounds the “Klip-fish” (Danish, Klippe, a rock), which is cleaned, salted, and stacked, with the stock-fish or dry-fish, simply split, washed, sunned, and turned by the women. The latter forms the national staff of life, and is not exported. “Fiskr” in Icelandic is especially applied to cod, trout, and salmon.

[372] The Maskat Arabs eat shark-meat, but they never apply the oil to the skin, considering it a caustic; rubbed into ship bottoms, it is supposed to defend the wood from worms.

[373] There was one corpse at the Hospital; the death had been caused by delirium tremens.

[374]

The “boiled shirt” costs 12 skillings = 3d. Flannel ” ” 8 ” = 2d. Socks and collars ” 3 ” = 1½d. Kerchiefs and white ties 2 ” = 1d.

You must be pretty careful, however, unless you wish your linen to go the way of all washing in all lands.

[375] I was once asked at an English country-house to show how coffee is made in Arabia; the housekeeper’s only remark was, “It is easy to make coffee like Captain Burton if one may use so much!” But the Arab system, though simple as it is scientific, cannot be learnt without long practice.

[376] The lich-gate proper in the cemetery is, or rather was, called Sálu-hlið, or souls’ gate.

[377] According to Professor J. M. Thiele (Copenhagen, 1832), he was descended on the spindle side--where, by-the-by, almost any descent can be established--from the royal blood of Scandinavia. The family, once settled at Óslandshlíð in Skagafjörð, sank, and his father Gottskálk emigrated to Copenhagen, where he lived by carving figureheads for shipwrights. His mother was a clergyman’s daughter, and he was born November 19, 1770. Finn Magnússon (Antiquitates Americanæ) has also drawn up his pedigree.

His first order from his northern home was, according to Thiele, a font which Countess Schimmelmann and her brother Baron Schubarth wished to present to the church of Brahe-Trolleberg in “Funen,” as we write Fyen. It was adorned with four bas-reliefs--the Baptism, the Holy Family, Christ blessing the children, and three angels. After being exhibited and admired at Copenhagen, it was sent to its destination, and a copy, we are told, was offered by the artist to the deserted land of his forefathers, to be _placed in Myklabye church_. A note informs us that this font was bought by a northern merchant, whereupon the artist immediately began another in Carrara marble. It is not said whether the third edition actually reached Myklabye church or is the one bought by Lord Caledon--evidently we have found it in the cathedral.

The “Patriarch of Bas-reliefs,” as the Italians entitled him (ob. 1844), has been called a “handsome young Dane,” when he was peculiarly Icelandic in body and mind. It was his misfortune to belong to the day of manufacturing sculptors, amongst whom he was the first and no more. But what can the artist expect from such inspiration as Jason, Anacreon and Cupid, Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, can give? The Icelander was pure and simple, free from the Gallicisms of Canova, an improvement upon Sergell the Swede, but cold, lacking life and interest; in fact, an imitator. I would rather in these days settle as an artist amongst the Kru-boys of the west coast of Africa, and attempt negro subjects, than copy the classics.

Richard Cleasby, who, by the by, killed himself with Cures, or rather Kurs, had a wide experience of men and manners in Europe, and his criticisms are sometimes sharp, but he left Thorvaldsen “with the impression of having been in the company of a great man.” The peculiar Icelandic traits in his character were an ultra-Yankee ‘cuteness in making a bargain, and a love of money, which led him into that ugly business of Madame d’Uhden. Still he amply deserves the statue for which the Municipal Council of Copenhagen has voted $6000, in honour of the Iceland Millenary.

[378] Síra is more commonly, but not so correctly, written Séra, and by foreigners Sjera; and I have heard it pronounced _Shera_. It is a Romance word, originally Senior, hence Seigneur, Signore, Senhor, Señor, Sir, Sir-r (Richardson), Sirrah, and “Sir-ree.” Icelanders still keep up our fashion of Shakespeare’s day, and apply it to clerks with the Christian name only, as Sir Hugh. _Magister_ was the university title of the M.A. in our fifteenth century: _Dominus_ (the Dan of Chaucer and his contemporaries, and the Don of modern Italian priests) was, and still is, the B.A., entered as Sir This or Sir That (the surname) in some of the college registers down to the time of Queen Anne, and, I believe, even in our day. Hence, possibly, the origin of the French Sir Brown and Sir Jones.

[379] This author also tells us that Sweden annually produces 38,000,000 of pots of Korn-schnapps, of which 6,000,000 are used for technological purposes.

[380] In 1872 no less than 1100 cases of illicit distillation were detected in Ireland, against 21 in England, and 8 in Scotland.

[381] The irrepressible statistician of the _Figaro_ assigns annually to England 50,000 deaths by drunkenness, of which 12,000 are women; 40,000 to Germany; 38,000 to the United States; 10,000 to Russia (??); 4000 to Belgium; and 1500 to virtuous France.

[382] Bishop Pètursson has a section (No. 3, p. 448, et seq.), “De regiis Islandiæ Satrapis,” amongst whom was a Count Ehrenreich C. L. Moltke. Chap. II. (p. 474) treats “de Finno Johannæo;” and Chap. III. (p. 479) “de Johanne Finnæo.”

[383] I made the mistake before leaving England of buying the Biblia published in the German character at Copenhagen in 1747, and found the language old-fashioned. The Oxford edition of the Bible Society, which sells for four marks, is certainly an improvement.

[384] Grímr and Grímnir are names of Odin, from his travelling in disguise: grímumaðr is a cowled man, “Mutalassam,” or “face-veiled,” as the Bedawin say.

[385] I see by the papers that Father Stub, the Barnabite, on his return to Berghen in Norway, opened a Catholic church, to the great satisfaction of the people.

[386] This common name of places in Iceland means Holts, hills; it is the plural of Hóll, but most writers put it in the dative plural, Hólum, as it would stand in composition “í Hólum” at Hólar. Possibly the intention is, despite grammar, to apply Hólum to the bishopric and Hólar to the other sites.

[387] The name has been discussed in the Introduction (Section VII.).

[388] Moðir is mother; Ammá (evidently a Sanskritic form), grandmother; and Edda is Proavia, or great-grandmother. Of course the derivation is disputed.

End of Project Gutenberg's Ultima Thule; vol. 1/2, by Richard R. Burton