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4. English Connections
Arngrímur was not simply an Icelandic curate with a taste for antiquities or
ole Worm’s friend, but a published author with a readership that reached
across northern europe, at least in certain learned circles (he published all
of his best-known works in Latin).30 Arngrímur was also well-known at
least in part because Worm, who addressed a European-wide audience,
persistently cited him in his works.31
Denmark was not alone in its efforts to recover an ancient past. In its
rival Sweden similar attempts were underway.32 In england too, antiquar-
ians and scholars showed renewed interest in their own “germanic” or
vernacular past. these endeavors stemmed, at least in part, from a desire
to find (and create) the national equivalents of a glorious ancient Rome
to look back on.33 In England this meant not only a renewed interest in
Anglo-Saxon language and culture but also growing awareness of the his-
torical connections between England and Scandinavia.34 english antiquar-
ians in particular had an appetite for northern antiquities and were inter-
ested in the connections between England and the Scandinavian countries
in the Middle Ages as it provided them with an ancient identity outside
roman influence. But English antiquarians also had difficulties with me-
dieval vernacular languages. Old english had become a foreign tongue (also
sometimes using runes) without many tools to help in its interpretation. It
is in this context that Beinecke MS 508 finds a home.
5. Identifying the Manuscript
In the Beineke catalogue, Albert Derolez, with the help of guðvarður Már
Gunnlaugsson, identifies these annals as closely related to the b version
30 seaton, Literary Relations, 10–11, 21–22, 225.
31 Arngrimi Jonae Opera Latine Conscripta, 4:38.
32 skovgaard-Petersen, Historiography at the Court, 121. One of the more fantastical of these
efforts can be found in Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica, in which he claims, among other things,
that Plato’s Atlantis can be identified as Sweden; see Ernst Ekman, “gothic Patriotism and
Olof Rudbeck,” The Journal of Modern History 34 (1962):59–60.
33 see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century
(oxford: oxford university Press, 1995).
34 seaton, Literary Relations, 202–74.
BEInECKE MAnuSCrIPt 508