Bertha S. Phillpotts - The Life of the Icelander Jón Ólafsson, Traveller to India, Written by Himself and Completed about 1661 A.D.

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The Life of the Icelander Jn lafsson, Traveller to India, Written by Himself and Completed about 1661 A.D.

With a Continuation, by Another Hand, up to his Death in 1679. Volume I. Life and Travels: Iceland, England, Denmark, White Sea, Faroes, Spitzbergen, Norway 1593-1622

Edited by
BERTHAS. PHILLPOTTS

First published by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Founded in 1846, the Hakluyt Society seeks to advance knowledge and education by the publication of scholarly editions of primary records of voyages, travels and other geographical material. In partnership with Ashgate, and using print-on-demand and e-book technology, the Society has made re-available all 290 volumes comprised in Series I and Series II of its publications in both print and digital editions. For information about the Hakluyt Society visit www.hakluyt.com .

ISBN-13: 978-1-4094-1420-9 ilibki

WORKS ISSUED BY

THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY

_______________

THE LIFE

of the

ICELANDER JN LAFSSON

SECOND SERIES
No. LIII

ISSUED FOR
1923

COUNCIL
OF
THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY

SIR ALBERT GRAY, K.C.B., K.C., President.

SIR JOHN SCOTT KELTIE, LL.D., Vice-President.

ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET THE RIGHT HON. SIR EDWARD HOBART SEYMOUR, G.C.B., O.M., G.C.V.O., LL.D., Vice-President.

BOLTON GLANVILL CORNEY, ESQ., I.S.O.

WILLIAM FOSTER, ESQ., C.I.E.

DOUGLAS W. FRESHFIELD, ESQ., D.C.L.

EDWARD HEAWOOD, ESQ., Treasurer.

ARTHUR R. HINKS, ESQ., C.B.E., F R.S.

SIR JOHN F. F. HORNER, K.C.V.O.

SIR EVERARD IM THURN, K.C.M.G., K.B.E., C.B.

SIR FREDERIC G. KENYON, K.C.B., P.B.A., LITT.D.

SIR CHARLES LUCAS, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.

ALFRED P. MAUDSLAY, ESQ., D.SC.

THE RIGHT HON. JAMES PARKER SMITH.

BRIG.-GEN. SIR PERCY M. SYKES, K.C.I.E., C.B., C.M.G.

H. R. TEDDER, ESQ.

LIEUT.-COLONEL SlR RlCHARD CARNAC TEMPLE, BART C.B., CLE., F.S.A.

SIR BASIL HOME THOMSON, K.C.B.

SIR REGINALD TOWER, K.C.M.G., C.V.O.

T. ATHOL JOYCE, ESQ., O.B.E., Hon. Secretary.

From the collection of the Royal Library, Copenhagen

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY W. LEWIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE

THE Autobiography of Jn lafsson, Traveller to the Indies, remained unprinted in Icelandic, save for a few excerpts, until 19089, when an edition by Mr Sigfs Blndal, Librarian of the Royal Library, was published in Copenhagen by the Icelandic Literary Society1. The text in this edition, which was based on a scholarly collation of the extant MSS., has been implicitly followed in the English translation.

A few excerpts or summaries from the work had been previously printed. Jn lafssons report of the conversation he and Jn Halldrsson had with Christian IV about the needs of their native country (. And in 1887 the editor Valdimar smundsson published a kind of digest of the work in his journal Fjallkonan.

But the fact that it was not printed does not justify us in assuming that it was not valued in Iceland. The great number of ms. copies of such a lengthy work (Mr Blndal has traced twenty-three) sufficiently prove its popularity. Its value was pointed out in Bishop Finnur Jnssons Historia. Ecclesiastica Islandiae. Some of the other annotations are from the Icelandic edition, and these are followed by the initials S.B. These notes, however, by no means fully represent my indebtedness to Mr Blndal for information, mainly but not exclusively concerning Icelandic matters. He has taken a lively interest in the English edition, and has collected further information for it.

Still greater however is the debt of the actual translation to Mr Blndal. Translation from any Icelandic work of the seventeenth century is rendered peculiarly laborious by the absence of a dictionary. Even Cleasby-Vigfssons Icelandic-English Dictionary pays little attention to the language after 1300 A.D., and the pocket dictionary of Modern Icelandic does not attempt to deal with the earlier centuries. Moreover a large part of Icelandic literature in the seventeenth century is still in mss. to which I had no access while I was making my translation. All these difficulties were aggravated by Jn lafssons custom of Icelandicizing a foreign term when he could not find an Icelandic one. Thus when stripped of their Icelandic disguise, Portuguese, German and Dutch terms, and even one Russian one, are revealed in his pages, besides many Danicisms. And the unfamiliarity of his style is a good deal increased by his frequent use of idiomatic terms which are not Icelandic or even Danish, but German in origin1.

Thus the task of translating the Autobiography was not an easy one, and I should certainly not have been able to regard my translation with any degree of real confidence if I had not had the help and advice of Mr Blndal, who was peculiarly well fitted to advise me, as he had already been engaged for years on his monumental Icelandic Dictionary, the first half of which is now published 2. Mr Blndal read the translation in MS. and again in proof, was always ready to discuss obscure passages, and thanks to his thorough knowledge of English was often able to suggest a closer rendering of a phrase than I had hit upon. The translation aims rather at accuracy than elegance, but I have tried to avoid quite modern words and phrases, and to reproduce something approaching Jns style, though for the comfort of the reader I have frequently divided Jns longer and more involved sentences into two.

Some of the mss. on which the Icelandic text is based occasionally give Icelandicized forms of Danish names, which are rather difficult to identify for any reader unversed in Icelandic : e.g. Krseyri for the Danish Korsr. A study of the List of Variant Readings in the Icelandic edition suggests that this Icelandicizing tendency is on the whole more characteristic of the later mss. than of the earliest. If Jn lafssons own MS. should ever be discovered, it would of course be desirable to give the Danish names exactly as they appear theremost of them probably in fairly normal Danish formsbut no purpose can be served by furnishing the English reader with Icelandic spelling of a Danish name, in one passage from a nineteenth-century, in the next from an eighteenth-century MS. I have accordingly given the ordinary Danish forms of Danish surnames and place-names in my text. All the variant spellings1 in Mr Blndals text will be found in the Index2, but of course there are innumerable other variants in the various mss. As will be seen from the notes, the great majority of persons mentioned are readily identifiable3, and in no case in this volume is there any doubt about the actual Danish name.

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