Skírnir - 01.04.2001, Page 123

SKÍRNIR HUGMYND UM BÓKMENNTASÖGU ÍSLENDINGA 117
Sibbern, Nicolaus Petrus. 1716. Bibliotheca Historica Dano-Norvegica, Sive De
Scriptoribus rerum Dano-Norvegicarum Commentarius Historico-Literari-
us. Hamborg og Leipzig.
Sibbern, Nicolaus Petrus. 1722. Die Gelassenheit im Glauben. Gliickstadt.
Sibbern, Nicolaus Petrus. 1760. Idea Historiae Literariae Islandorum breviter
delineata. Bls. 176-228 í Dreyer, Monumenta anecdota.
Thura, Albert. 1723. Idea Historiæ Literariœ Danorum. Hamborg.
Thura, Albert. 1732. Gynœceum Daniœ litteratum. Altona.
Worm, Jens. 1771-84. Forseg til et Lexicon over danske, norske og islandske lœrde
Mœnd. 3 bindi. Helsingjaeyri og Kaupmannahöfn.
Summary
The article aims to give an account of the first attempts to write Icelandic literary
histories in Latin and to explain the origin and authorship of an obscure Latin trea-
tise published in 1760 in Liibeck and Altona, Idea Historiae Literariae Islandor-
um. Surprisingly, the author of the treatise, Nicolaus Petrus Sibbern (1684-ca.
1729), priest at the Danish royal palace in Gliickstadt, is not found in standard
reference works and unknown even to those studying Icelandic literary history.
An occasional bibliography even contradicts the title page claiming that the trea-
tise is “written for the most part” by Jón Thorkillius (1697-1759), but nowhere is
there an explanation of why Sibbern is named as the author or what his contri-
bution to the treatise may have been. The article argues that while Icelandic medi-
eval literature was from the beginning closely connected to Latin letters and had
been mined after the reformation for material to write Latin treatises on the his-
tory of the Danish and Swedish monarchies, the idea of writing a specific history
of Icelandic literature in any language belongs to the early 18th century. This idea
is traced to a Latin treatise on Roman literary history, Idea Historiae Literariae
Romanorum (1718) by Christian Falster, schoolmaster of Ribe in Jutland, which
had spawned the first Danish literary history, Idea Historiae Literariae Danorum
(1723), by Falster’s pupil, Albert Thura. These treatises are imbued with the cul-
tural ideals of the humanists; the aim of presenting a literary history of the Danes
is to disprove that the nation is barbaric and to elevate the status of its vernacular
literature by comparing it with Latin letters. The novelty of these works is both
the strong emphasis on the institutions that fostered them and the method of
classifying literature according to genre, when older treatises had presented liter-
ary historical studies in the form of alphabetised catalogues of authors. The ques-
tion of method is prominent in the writings of these pioneers of literary histor-
iography. At the same time, Árni Magnússon gathered a new and large library of
Icelandic manuscripts which made it possible to fully survey Icelandic literature,
especially the medieval poetry and sagas. Not surprisingly Magnússon was the first
to begin to gather material for an Icelandic literary history in Latin, although this