Guðbrandur Vigfússon

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Guðbrandur Vigfússon or Gudbrand Vigfusson (born 1827 or 1828; died January 31, 1889) was the foremost Scandinavian scholar of the 19th century.

[edit] Life

He was born of an old Icelandic family in Breiðfjörð. He was brought up, until he went to a tutor's, by his kinswoman, Kristin Vigfussdottir, 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; and in 1849, already a fair scholar, he came to Copenhagen University as a bursarius 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 till, as he said, he knew every scrap of old vellum and of Icelandic written paper in that whole collection. During his time in Denmark he twice revisited Iceland (last in 1858), and made short tours in Norway and South Germany with friends.

In 1866, after some months in London, he settled down in Oxford, which he made his home for the rest of his life. He left it only for visits to the great Scandinavian libraries or to London (to work during two or three long vacations with his fellow-laborer, F. Y. Powell), or for short trips to places such as the Isle of Man, Orkney and Shetland, the old mootstead of the West Saxons at Downton, the Roman station at Pevensey, the burial-place of Bishop Brynjulfs ill-fated son at Yarmouth, and the like. He held the office of Reader in Scandinavian at Oxford University (a post created for him) from 1884 till his death. He was a Jubilee Doctor of Uppsala, 1877, and received the Danish order of the Dannebrog in 1885. Vigfusson died of cancer. He was buried in St. Sepulchre's Cemetery, Oxford, on the 3rd of February, 1889.

[edit] Work

He was an excellent judge of literature, reading most European languages well and being acquainted with their classics. His memory was remarkable, and if the Eddic poems had ever been lost, he could have written them all down from memory. He spoke English well, with a strong Icelandic accent. He wrote a beautiful, distinctive and clear hand, in spite of the thousands of lines of manuscript copying he had done in his early life.

His Tunatdl (written between October 1854 and April 1855) laid the foundations for the chronology of Icelandic history, in a series of conclusions that have not been displaced (save by his own additions and corrections), and that earned the praise of Jacob Grimm. His editions of Icelandic classics (1858-1868), Biskopa Sögur, Bardar Saga, Porn Sögur (with Mobius), Eyrbyggia Saga and Flateyar-bók (with Unger) opened a new era of Icelandic scholarship. They can be compared to the Rolls Series editions of chronicles by William Stubbs, for the interest and value of their prefaces and texts.

Seven years (1866-1873) were given to the Oxford Icelandic-English Dictionary, the best guide to classic Icelandic, and a monumental example of single-handed work. His later series of editions (1874-1885) included Orkneyinga Saga and Hdconar Saga, the great and complex mass of Icelandic historical sagas known as Sturlunga, and the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, in which he edited the entire body of classic Scandinavian poetry.

As an introduction to the Sturlunga, he wrote a complete, concise history of the classic Northern literature and its sources. In the introduction to the Corpus, he laid the foundations of a critical history of the Eddic poetry and Court poetry of the North in a series of well-supported theories.

His little Icelandic Prose Reader (with F. York Powell) (1879) furnishes a path to a sound knowledge of Icelandic. The Grimm Centenary Papers (1886) give good examples of the range of his historic work, while his Appendix on Icelandic currency to Sir G. W. Dasent's Burnt Njal is a methodical investigation into an intricate subject.

As a writer in his own tongue, he once gained a high position by his Relations of Travel in Norway and South Germany. In English, as his Visit to Grimm and his powerful letters to The Times show, he had attained no mean skill. His life is mainly a record of well-directed and efficient labor in Denmark and Oxford.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.