Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas

Book Description

London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1863. Large 8vo. (9 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches). Half-title. 1 folding lithographic map with the author's route marked in red, 16 plates (4 lithographs printed in colours by Hanhart, 12 wood-engraved plates by Edmund Evans), all after the author's drawings. (Some light marginal spotting and soiling). Later brown half morocco over marbled paper-covered boards by P.B. Sanford, spine gilt in six compartments with wide raised bands, the bands tooled in gilt, lettered in gilt in the second and fourth compartments, t.e.g. A fine copy of the first edition of this valuable work on Iceland. "Off at last! Farewell comfort, ease, good food, snug beds! Welcome hard riding, rain and cold, scanty diet and the ground for a couch." So begins Sabine Baring-Gould's account of his journey on horseback around Iceland in 1862. Sabine-Gould, the nephew of the Arctic explorer Sir Edward Sabine, became fascinated with the Sagas of the north, taught himself Icelandic using a German-Icelandic dictionary, and during a long summer holiday from the school where he was a teacher he set out to explore the locations described in the Icelandic Sagas and to capture them in prose and picture. This book is the result: a lively adventure story as much as a travel book: the writing style is clearly that of an author destined to write fiction (as Baring-Gould went on to do). The book includes a number of valuable appendices, the first "A Note on the Ornithology of Iceland" by Alfred Newton; a second "Advice for Sportsmen"; a third "A List of Icelandic Plants"; a fourth "A List of Icelandic Sagas"; and a fifth listing the author's expenses during the trip. Cf. Sabine Baring-Gould. Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas (Signal Books, 2007), with a valuable foreword by Martin Graebe

Not sure what some of these terms mean? Look it up in our glossary.