Corpus Poeticum Boreale the Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue - From the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century Edited Classified and With Introduction, Excursus, and Notes #226343

It is to the credit of the Icelanders as a living people that it is not so. Yet such, if he had formulated his creed, would have been the Editor's belief before he began to look for himself, some twenty years ago, into the state of literature and literary tradition in the middle ages and the post-reformation days of Iceland. In the arna-magnaean Collection, a vast congeries of all kinds of documents bearing on the subject, memoranda, letters, vellums, fragments of vellums, and paper-copies of vellums, there exists ample material for getting at some notion of the true state of the case. It was while working at this collection, making careful statistics of these vellums and the vellum fragments representing lost vellums, that the opinions now set forth forced themselves bit by hit upon the Editor. The following results came out from a minute enquiry into the state of the mss. Of the classical literature — the Sagas touching Iceland, the Kings' Lives, the Older Bishops' Lives, etc.