Guðbrandur Vigfússon

Guðbrandur Vigfússon, also Anglicized as Gudbrand Vigfusson known ( * March 13, 1827; † January 31, 1889 ) was one of the most important Scandinavian scholars of the 19th century.

Life

Guðbrandur Vigfússon was born in Iceland in Breiðafjörður and brought up by his relatives and foster mother Kristín Vigfússdóttir. He attended high school in Bessastaðir and ( after the transfer ) in Reykjavík. 1849 or 1850 he went to the University of Copenhagen as Bursar dorm Regensen.

Subsequently, he worked for fourteen years as Stipendarius at the Arnamagnäanischen library until he, in his own words, "every scrap of old vellum and of Icelandic written paper" throughout the collection knew.

In 1857, he met in Copenhagen Konrad Maurer know. The two men struck up a close friendship, which they used all their lives.

1866 moved to Oxford Guðbrandur Vigfússon in England, where he spent the rest of his life. He held there from 1884 at the University of Oxford, the position of the reader for Scandinavian, a body set up for him place held. In 1877 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala. In 1885 he received the Danish Dannebrogorden.

Guðbrandur died on January 31, 1889 from cancer. He was buried on February 3, 1889 at St. Sepulchre 's Cemetery, Oxford.

Work

Guðbrandur Vigfússon was an outstanding literary connoisseur. He dominated most European languages ​​and was familiar with their classical works. His memory was also outstanding.

His first work order tímatal í í Íslendinga sögum fornöld (from October 1854 to April 1855 written ) laid the foundation for the chronology of the early history of Iceland. His subsequent editions of Icelandic classics (1858-1868), Biskupa sögur, Bardar Saga, Fornsögur ( with Theodor Möbius ), Eyrbyggja Saga and Flateyarbók ( with Carl Richard Unger) opened a new era of Iceland Research.

Starting with his relocation to England, he worked for seven years (1866-1873) at the Oxford Icelandic - English Dictionary, the best time to his dictionary for classic Icelandic, a monumental work of a single hand.

Then he turned again to the Icelandic sagas. His editions (1874-1885) included the Orkney Inga Saga and past the Håkonar saga, the large and complex collection of historical Iceland Sagas, the Sturlunga saga, and the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883 ), in which he revised the whole work in the classic Scandinavian poetry. As an introduction to the Sturlunga saga he wrote a complete and detailed history of classic Nordic literature and its sources. In his introduction to the corpus that laid the foundation for a critical history of eddischen seal and court poetry of the north in a series of sound theories.

As a writer in his mother tongue, he received recognition for his travelogues from Norway and southern Germany.