Guðbrandur Vigfússon

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This is an Icelandic name. The last name is patronymic, not a family name; this person is referred to by the given name Guðbrandur.
A portrait of Guðbrandur Vigfússon by Sigurður málari.

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

Life

He was born of an

Regense College,[2] where as an Icelander he received four-years free boarding under the Garðsvist system.[3]

After his student course, he was appointed

Arna-Magnaean Library until, as he said, he knew every scrap of old vellum and of Icelandic written paper in that whole collection.[2]

In 1866, he settled in

office of Reader in Scandinavian at Oxford University (a post created for him) from 1884 until his death. He was made a Jubilee Doctor of Uppsala in 1877, and received the Danish order of the Dannebrog in 1885.[2]

Guðbrandur died of

St. Sepulchre's Cemetery, Oxford, on 3 February 1889.[2]

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 (or because of) the thousands of lines of manuscript copying he had done in his early life.[2]

His Tímatal (written between October 1854 and April 1855) laid the foundations for the chronology of Icelandic history. His editions of Icelandic classics (1858–1868),

Bárðar Saga, Fornsögur (with Mobius), Eyrbyggia Saga and Flateyjarbók (with Carl Rikard 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.[2]

He spent the seven years 1866–1873 on the Oxford Icelandic-English Dictionary,[4] often denoted by the shorthand "Cleasby-Vigfusson",[5] the best guide to classic Icelandic, and a monumental example of single-handed work.[2] The end-product was more a product of Guðbrandur Vigfússon's undertaking than Cleasby's,[6] and is characterized as his most important legacy.[7]

His later series of editions (1874–1885) included

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.[2]

His little Icelandic Prose Reader (with

Sir G. W. Dasent's Burnt Njal is a methodical investigation into an intricate subject.[2]

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.[2]

Literature

  • Hans Fix: Gudbrand Vigfusson, Hugo Gering, and German Scholarship: Or, A Friendship Destroyed. in
    ISBN 978-0692520161

Notes

  1. ^ Jón þorkelsson, "Nekrolog över Guðbrandur Vigfússon" in Arkiv för nordisk filologi, Sjätte bandet (ny följd: andra bandet), Lund, 1889, pp 156-163.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Powell (1911)
  3. ^ Benedikz (1989), p. 15.
  4. ^ Cleasby, Richard; Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1884). An Icelandic-English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  5. ^ Lowe, Pardee Jr. (1884), Benediktsson, Hreinn [in Icelandic] (ed.), "Postulates for Making Bilingual Dictionaries", The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics: Proceedings, vol. 39, Visindafélag íslendinga, p. 406
  6. ^ Garnett, Richard (1887). "Cleasby, Richard" . In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 11. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  7. ^ "Vigfusson, Gudbrandur", The New International Encyclopædia, vol. 20, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911, p. 131

References

External links

Media related to Guðbrandur Vigfússon at Wikimedia Commons

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