Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Blaðsíða 7
PREFATORY NOTE V
prefatory Pote.
The first, tentative issue of Mimir is unavoidably
marred by many imperfections. It is hoped that most of
these defects and errors, with the kind aid of those whose
names belong in its lists, will have disappeared in a second
issue, to be made at an early day.
The objects of the publication are: i. To facilitate
research, in the territory which it attempts to cover, by
making the labourers in the same domain known to one
! another — that the work of each may be rendered available
J to all; 2. To inform the people of Iceland, on the one
| hand, of the wide and encouraging interest taken by the
learned of other nations in their early literature and history,
| and of the valuable results of that interest; 3. To bring
the foreign student of Old-Northern letters, on the other
hand, into nearer relations with the only region in which
the Old-Northern language is still a living speech, in which
the Sagas are still household reading, and the sense and
sentiment of the ancient poems are still felt, while, in other
Germanic lands, the classics of the earlier periods —
Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales, the Nibelungen lays
and the epic story of Parsifal — have become works no
longer understood of the people; 4. To promote the proper
development, already happily begun, of that little nationality,
a fragment of the old Teutonic world, which has kept itself