Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1943, Side 9

INTRODUCTION
I
THE PREHISTORY OF THE TREATISES
The two treatises here edited for the first time were written in
the summer of 1647 by borlåkur Skulason of Holar (1597-1656) and
Brynjålfur Sveinsson of Skålholt (1605-75), then Icelandic bishops.
The reason for the appearance of the treatises, according to the title
of the first of them, was that Otte Krag, Secretary to the Danish
Chancellery, had sent the bishops some extracts, “collectanea”, from
the writings of foreign authors on Iceland. Krag must have requested
the bishops to give their opinion on the correctness of these “col-
lectanea”, which they accordingly did, in the two replies retumed
simultaneously. The contents and whole arrangement of the two
treatises plainly show that the “collectanea” sent to the bishops must
have been identical; that the replies differ somewhat is of course due
to the different character and Outlook of the two men. Taken together
they furnish a good deal of information about contemporary Iceland,
and no less about the attitude of educated Icelanders to the various
views of the outside world on their native land.
To obtain some knowledge of the nature of the above-mentioned
“collectanea” and to determine their source it will be necessary in
the first place to go back to the evolution of foreign descriptions of
Iceland in the century preceding the composition of our two treatises.
The growing interest in geographical descriptions of foreign coun-
tries which appears in the period after the great voyages of explora-
tion at the close of the i5th century, also manifests itself in a
considerable number of accounts and maps of Iceland from the 16th
century. The number of the descriptions, however, is in inverse ratio
to their importance as sources, for most of them mainly consist of
repetitions of the statements of earlier authors. The oldest accounts