Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Introductory Chapters By the late Professor York Powell - I. Materials
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and Annales Cambriæ, and by stray facts and names
from other Welsh sources. To these must be added
the Latin Chronicle of Man.
First at the head of Scandinavian authorities stands
Are the historian, whose works–the Book of the
Settlements in Iceland,[1] the Libellus Islandorum (a
sketch of early Icelandic history), and Book of the
Kings of Norway (which we have as edited by Snorre
Sturlason in the thirteenth century), with many
memoranda from other of his writings no longer
extant–give the best and fullest information on the
condition of heathen Norway, and on the fortunes
and deeds of such of the emigrants therefrom, as
finally, after years of foray and conquest in the British
Islands, passed on to the new-found and uninhabited
shores of the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland. The
history of King Half and some of the family Sagas of
Iceland, give what is probably independent
information. But on this side we should get an incomplete
notion of those wickings, or sea-rovers, whose exploits
helped to make our history, without the help of the
so-called Eddic poems, a series of epic and dramatic
lays, chiefly of the ninth and tenth centuries, many
of which were, we may confidently hold, composed
within the four seas, and no doubt reflect accurately
the spirit of the very men that first made and heard
them, the conquering Scandinavian settlers in Great
Britain or Gaul. Among these there are found in the
MS. that has luckily preserved much of them to us, a
poem or two, the earliest, that we may ascribe to the
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