Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1939, Page 467
FINLAND AND ICELAND
457
you will be surprised to find frequent attempts to reproduce one
or several of the poems of the Finnish national bard. There can
be no doubt that of the foreign verse favoured by Icelanders in
the i^th century Runeberg’s works were among the most popular.
The man who could write
Vart land ár fattigt, skall sa bli
för den, som guld begár,
en frámling far oss stolt förbi;
men detta landet álska vi,*)
can always be sure of eliciting a hearty response from Icelandic
readers.
Topelius, too, is fairly well represented in Icelandic translated
literature, chiefly by his tales but also by some of his poems. Ice-
landic children’s magazines have printed several of his tales for
the young which have also been published in book form; and
his principal work, Feltskárns Beráttelser, translated by Matthías
Jochumsson, appeared in Icelandic in the years 1904—9. It was
among the books which in those years were received with the
greatest pleasure by the book-loving Icelandic nation.
The Finnish language is quite different from ours. And yet
philology tells us the marvellous tale that this language gives
us the means of a deeper understanding of our own. In ancient
times, long before any human being had set foot on the shores of
Iceland, the Finnish tongue adopted a number of Nordic loan-
words. Later on the words have been worn down among us (and
still more so in the other Scandinavian languages), but in the
Finnish language they have been preserved in a form that often
resembles the ancient one. It can be shown that the words ár,
kelda, nafarr, drottinn, sárr, must once in prehistoric times have
had the forms airo, kaldio, nabagairaz, druhtinaz, sairaz, and
it seems to us as if we were listening to the thousand-year old
tongue of our forefathers when we hear among the Finns, who
have retained these words, the forms airo, kaltio, napakaira,
ruhtinas, sairas.
As yet there has hardly been any Icelander who has devoted
himself to the study of the Finnish language; at any rate such
*) Our country is poor and will always remain so for those who desire
8°ld; a foreigner proudly passes us by, but we love this country.
Le Nord, 1939, 4
80