Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands - Nýr flokkur - 01.01.1991, Page 87

GEORGE WEBBE DASENT
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Ballads very badly it seems to me. He has taken a good deal of pain
with the Book but seems to have little or no poetic spirit.
March 7 [1861]. Neither am I dead but I have now been very
well & more that usually busy, since I last wrote. Njál will be out
next week. I have done the best I can for him & now the public
must decide how they like him. I think it is a great shame that a
Committee of the Arna Magnæan Bequest or some other compe-
tent body do not at once settle these intricate questions of money
[Ed. i.e. the value of medieval Icelandic money in modern terms].
March 11 [1861]. I wrote to you a day or two ago. I now write to
ask you to send me by Book Post or some speedy way Andersen’s38
new Tales, which I see from Fædrelandet39 has just come out. Njál
will be out on Saturday. Please to tell me also whether the days for
the steamers going to Iceland40 are yet fixed. It would be much
more convenient for me to go in the Middle of July than in the
Middle of June, but I can only be two months away. John
Campbell41 would go too; a famous fellow.
March 21 [1861]. I think you are a good fellow to take my
peppery letter so kindly, but really it is for the interest of Denmark
that I should write as I did... Njal is out. That is I have got a few
copies and the Public will have it in a day or two. A thousand copies
have been sold before it appeared, so you see England takes an
interest in Iceland. It is not for me to say how the Book is done. I
best know its faults. For the rest it is a very pretty Book & has cost a
mint of money to get up. It is also very dear 28s. I am going to send
a copy now and another for Guðbrandr and another for Rafn42
38. Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75); Dasent’s admiration for Andersen as a writer and
his dislike of Andersen as a person was shared in Britain by several other notable literary
figures, Charles Dickens amongst them, in the wake of the Dane’s disastrous visit to London
in 1857.
39. Copenhagen newspaper.
40. Dasent visited Iceland in the summers of 1861 (in the company of Grímur Thomsen)
and 1862; see Charles Clifford’s entertaining account, Travels by Umbra (Edinburgh, 1863;
again Edmonston and Douglas were the publishers), which depicts Dasent as ‘Mr. Darwin’,
a comically crazed enthusiast for Norse literature, which he recites relentlessly at every
famous saga-stead encountered. Grímur Thomsen is sympathetically portrayed as ‘Mr.
Jonson from Copenhagen’.
41. J.F. Campbell of Islay (1822-1885); see above note 3. Campbell accompanied Dasent to
Iceland in 1861 and 1862.
42. The prolific Danish scholar and editor C.C. Rafn (1795-1864).