Mímir. Icelandic institutions with adresses - 15.12.1903, Side 83

NOTES ON ICELANDIC MATTERS 73
make famous the libraries of foreign lands, not a few of them
perishing in transit by accidents of fire and flood. But it turned I
out that to the foreign despoilers the manuscripts were dumb.
Their words were voiceless except to those who wrote them.
They were as unintelligible as were the hieroglyphs carved on
the obelisks of Egypt to the Romans, who pulled them down
on the banks of the Nile to set them up again on the banks
of the Tiber. Thus it was that the children of Iceland had
again to rescue from oblivion the records of our ancestral wis-
dom. They had to interpret, to the duller generations of the
old family, the words their ancestors had formerly committed
to stone and parchment, to reconstruct the monuments and
muniments, of which their new owners proved to be unworthy
keepers. It is then to Icelanders that we owe the first grammars
of the primitive speech, published at Copenhagen and Oxford.
It is they who have been the compilers of dictionaries and
the commentators of the classic writings. But, in addition to
all this, the general literary production of Iceland in modern
times, in branches of letters other than those we are treating
°f, is likewise surprising. Her people number 80.000, to which
may be added 25,000 more in northern North America, who j
still prefer to speak their own tongue rather than the English.
This is the population of a minor city in the larger lands ot
civilization. But an examination of the yearly output of her
presses—journals, magazines, books, pamphlets — and a com-
parison of it with the literary productions of any other com-
munity of many times the size, will show how wonderful is
the love of letters still fostered by the rocky soil to which the |
Eddas and Sagas of Iceland’s first centuries owe their birth.” [
Recent Constitutional Changes. — The existing constitu
tion of Iceland was conferred upon it by the present King of
Denmark in 1874, on the occasion of the celebration of the
millenial anniversary of the island’s settlement. It gave to the |
ancient Althing (revived, with only advisory functions in 1845.