Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1943, Page 10

VIII
from this period are based partly on medieval authors such as Adam
of Bremen, Saxo, and Giraldus Cambrensis, and partly on mostly
rather unreliable mariners’ tales and other narratives which had
reached foreign countries through the seamen who visited Iceland.
These records of course contained various details which were correct
in themselves but which had generally been detached from their
natural context in such a way that they came to occupy a dispropor-
tionate space in the descriptions of Iceland of that time, and so
brought the whole account out of focus. To this must be added the
predilection of the authors for marvellous and fantastic accounts of
little known countries, so that they often assigned a place in the
background to simple and sober facts for the benefit of supernatural
phenomena of various kinds.
This is not the place to review in more detail the accounts of
Iceland dating from the i6th century; on that subject the reader
may be referred to borvaldur Thoroddsen’s and Halldor Hermanns-
son’s works1. Only some main points must be indicated to facilitate
the understanding of what is to follow.
The earliest descriptions of Iceland from the i6th century (in
Jacob Ziegler’s Schondia 1532, Sebastian Miinster’s Cosmographia
1544, Albert Krantz’ Chronica 1546, and Olaus Magnus’ Historia
de gentibus septentrionalibus 1555) became the models for the ideas
about Iceland entertained by the outside world for a long time to
come. Nor was anything else to be expected, widespread as were
these books in numerous impressions and adaptations. What especially
gained credence and was most frequently repeated in the various
briefer compendia was of course the most fantastic of the accounts,
while a good many of the less startling—but more correct—facts
were consigned to oblivion. Corrections of the patent errors did not
occur. Not until the close of the i6th century did the Icelanders
themselves come forward to protest against the monstrosities of the
descriptions. The cause was, curiously enough, the first description
of Iceland given by a direct eye-witness. It was a poem in Low
1 t>. Thoroddsen, LandfræSissaga Islands I 1892-96 (termed in the sequel
Lfrs. = Geschichte der islandischen Geographie I 1897; termed Gesch. in the
sequel) ; H. Hermannsson, Islandica XVII 1926 (Two Cartographers) and XXI
1931 (The Cartography of Iceland).