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This momentous conversation ended in a few minutes with warm acknowledgments paid by the German to the Icelandic Professor. At this dinner my uncle had just elicited important facts, amongst others, the history of Saknussemm, the reason of the mysterious document, that his host would not accompany him in his expedition, and that the very next day a guide would be waiting upon him.
We sometimes lost all traces of a road, and only pushed on towards the quarter in which the place of our destination was situated; and feared withal to sink at every pace into the soft and unresisting soil. I found the indolence of the Icelandic peasants quite unpardonable. All the valleys through which we passed were large morasses richly overgrown with grass.
In Icelandic sagas, in the Relations of the old Jesuit missionaries, in the Travels of Pallas and Gmelin, we hear of medicine- men and Berserks who take liberties with red-hot metal, live coals, and burning wood. 'The Berserkir said: "I can walk through the burning fire with my bare feet."
In this connection it is well to consider the history of the Icelandic people, where a small folk has for a thousand years been exposed to a range and severity of trials, such as earthquakes, volcanic explosions, and dearth of harvests may produce, and all these in a measure that few if any other countries experience.
It was an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon 'wyrm, meaning a dragon or snake; or from the Gothic 'waurms, a serpent; or the Icelandic 'ormur, or the German 'wurm. We gather that it conveyed originally an idea of size and power, not as now in the diminutive of both these meanings. Here legendary history helps us.
Norwegian women come with full suffrage rights; Finnish delegates come as representatives of the only nation which has elected women to seats in its Parliament; Sweden and Iceland have gained a step in eligibility and our Icelandic delegate of two years ago is now a member of the city council of Reykjavik, the capital.
Anglo-Saxon literature has several references to this cycle, which must have been a very popular one; and there is also a late Continental German version preserved in an Icelandic translation. But the poem in the Edda is the oldest connected form of the story. Again the oldest reference is in Anglo-Saxon.
Professor Rafn, the distinguished archæologist of Northern lore, is still as active as ever, notwithstanding he is well advanced in years. After going up an innumerable number of steps, I found him at the very top of a high old building in the Kronprinzensgade, in a study crammed with old Norsk and Icelandic volumes.
His wife followed, pronounced the same word, with the same ceremonial, then the husband and wife, placing their right hands upon their hearts, bowed profoundly. This excellent Icelandic woman was the mother of nineteen children, who, little and big, rolled, crawled, and walked about in the midst of volumes of smoke arising from the angular fireplace in the middle of the room.
This was, besides several very old books in the Icelandic tongue, three thick folio volumes, which I could read very easily; they were German, and contained Luther's doctrines, letters, epistles, &c. I had now seen all there was to be seen, and began to satisfy my physical wants by calling for some hot water to make coffee, &c.
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