Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1957, Page 446

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NOTES
345—58), AJ deals with the particular arguments Pontanus had
brought forward against AJ’s treatment of the Thule-question
in Crymogæa. AJ shows here that Pontanus’s objections are of
no great value. He considers the most important of them to be
Pontanus’s claim that in these parts there is no country other
than Iceland which could be Thule. In replying, AJ refers to the
islands in the Zeni’s story, to the Faroes and to various islands
off the coast of Scotland. Then there is the question of Pontan-
us’s arguments based on Ansgar’s documents, which AJ had
already dismissed. Finally, AJ considers various individual points
in Pontanus’s work, with the same result throughout: rejection
of Pontanus’s criticism of Crymogæa. AJ takes special pains to
emphasise that A.D. 874 as the date of the first settlement in
Iceland is not a decisive criterion by which to judge the correct-
ness of his views, although Pontanus had tried to make it so by
a kind of misrepresentation (cf. above). AJ also attacks Pon-
tanus’s statement that influence from other languages besides
Norwegian is discernible in Icelandic, by which he had tried to
prove that the earliest inhabitants were, at least in part, of dif-
ferent origin. Pontanus made a most unhappy selection of
evidence to support this, especially in giving the name Grimus
(Grimr), which AJ can easily show to be a genuine Norse word.
AJ further considers that certain Icelandic customs, which, as
Pontanus pointed out, had parallels amongst other nations, could
easily be explained by the Icelanders’ extensive travels, from
which they brought back both good and bad. Finally, AJ ends
his discussion by expressing his hope that Pontanus will not take
his defence amiss, since he had been compelled to undertake it in
order to uphold the veracity of the Icelandic sources.
AJ’s discussion must on the whole be considered satisfactory,
even though it is at times rather long-winded and cast rather too
firmly in the rhetorical mould of the contemporary art of dispu-
tation. His arguments on the Thule-problem are at least as sound
as those of Pontanus, and on the question of the documents
later research has found in AJ’s favour. That his book did not
solve the Thule-problem or convince all his contemporaries is
another matter. Thus, for example, both the Icelandic bishops,
Porlakur Skulason and Brynjolfur Sveinsson, took an opposite