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In reality, the conventional dialect ascribed to the rustic order in general to peasants even more than to gentlemen in our English plays and novels, is a childish and fantastic babble, belonging to no form of real breathing life; nowhere intelligible; not in any province; whilst, at the same time, all provinces Somersetshire, Devonshire, Hampshire are confounded with our midland counties; and positively the diction of Parricombe and Charricombe from Exmoor Forest is mixed up with the pure Icelandic forms of the English lakes, of North Yorkshire, and of Northumberland.
Stories are told in the Icelandic sagas of the way such persons were entrapped and put to death by the chiefs they served when they became too troublesome. It is the same "motif" as Guy of Warwick and the Saracen lady, and one of the regular Giant and Knight stories. Beside men-warriors there were "women-warriors" in the North, as Saxo explains.
OTHER WORLDS. The "Land of Undeath" is spoken of as a place reached by an exiled hero in his wanderings. We know it from Eric the traveller's S., Helge Thoreson's S., Herrand and Bose S., Herwon S., Thorstan Baearmagn S., and other Icelandic sources. But the voyage to the Other Worlds are some of the most remarkable of the narratives Saxo has preserved for us.
Even the Icelandic colony in Greenland has disappeared, and the eastern coast, on which especially it was settled, has become long inaccessible, in consequence of the immense accumulation of ice in the straits between it and Iceland.
There is more good honest velvet in an Expense-Account than in the Stock Exchange, which true saying has nothing to do with Abbey. At the "Centennial" Abbey discovered the Arthurian Legend fell over it, just as William Morris fell over the Icelandic Sagas when past fifty.
As in every church where prayers have been offered up since the world began, the majority of the congregation were women, some few dressed in bonnets, and the rest in the national black silk skull-cap, set jauntily on one side of the head, with a long black tassel hanging down to the shoulder, or else in a quaint mitre of white linen, of which a drawing alone could give you an idea, the remainder of an Icelandic lady's costume, when not superseded by Paris fashions, consists of a black bodice fastened in front with silver clasps, over which is drawn a cloth jacket, ornamented with a multitude of silver buttons; round the neck goes a stiff ruff of velvet, figured with silver lace, and a silver belt, often beautifully chased, binds the long dark wadmal petticoat round the waist.
From. 902 to the fall of the empire, the emperors retained a large body-guard of Scandinavians, who, armed with double-edged battle-axes, were renowned through the world, under the name of Varengar, or the Vaeringjar of the old Icelandic Sagas. Such were the ancient Scandinavians. To this extraordinary people the English and their descendants alone bear any resemblance.
Elsewhere, as in Iceland, Normandy, and ancient Greece, the bird is an eagle, a swallow, an ostrich, or a hoopoe. In the Icelandic and Pomeranian myths the schamir, or "raven-stone," also renders its possessor invisible, a property which it shares with one of the treasure-finding plants, the fern.
It may be mentioned here that Carl Christian Rafn and the other Danish scholars who edited this elaborate work have concluded that Kjalarnes is the modern Cape Cod, Straumsfjordr is Buzzard's Bay, Straumsey is Martha's Vineyard, and Hop is on the shores of Mount Haup Bay, into which the river Taunton flows. English readers of Icelandic owe a large debt to Dr.
He often describes human determination and man's struggle with destiny, especially in his historical novels, which are set in most periods of Icelandic history. More moving, perhaps, are his novels on contemporary themes. This is one of the major works of Icelandic literature containing a fascinating world of fancy, invention, and reality.
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