Origines Islandicae; a Collection of the More Important Sagas and Other Native Writings Relating to the Settlement and Early History of Iceland; Volume 01

by Guðbrandur Vigfússon, Frederick York Powell

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752 pages, Paperback

Published February 5, 2018

About the author

Guðbrandur Vigfússon, known in English as Gudbrand Vigfusson, (born 13 March 1827; died 31 January 1889[1]) was one of the foremost Scandinavian scholars of the 19th century.

He was born of an old Icelandic family in Breiðafjörður. He was brought up, until he went to a tutor's, by his kinswoman Kristín Vigfússdóttir, to whom he records, he owed not only that he became a man of letters but almost everything. He was sent to the old school at Bessastad and (when it moved there) at Reykjavík. In 1849, already a fair scholar, he came to Copenhagen University as a bursarius (bursar) in the Regense College.

After his student course, he was appointed stipendiarius by the Arna-Magnaean trustees, and worked for fourteen years in the Arna-Magnaean Library until, as he said, he knew every scrap of old vellum and of Icelandic written paper in that whole collection.

In 1866, he settled down in Oxford, which he made his home for the rest of his life. He held the office of Reader in Scandinavian at Oxford University (a post created for him) from 1884 till his death. He was made a Jubilee Doctor of Uppsala in 1877, and received the Danish order of the Dannebrog in 1885.

Guðbrandur died of cancer on 31 January 1889. He was buried in St. Sepulchre's Cemetery, Oxford, on the 3rd of February, 1889.