Newcastle-on-Tyne, Oct 7. 1850.
If F.Q. will look into Halfdan Einersen's edition of _Kongs-skugg-sio_,
Soröe, 1768, the first time it was printed, he will find in the editor's
preliminary remarks all that is known of the date and origin of the work.
The author is unknown, but that he was a Northman and lived in Nummedal, in
Norway, and wrote somewhere between 1140 and 1270, or, according to Finsen,
about 1154; and that he had in his youth been a courtier, and afterwards a
royal councillor, we infer from the internal evidence the work itself
affords us. _Kongs-skugg-sio_, or the royal mirror, deserves to be better
known, on account of the lively picture it gives us of the manners and
customs of the North in the twelfth century; the state of the arts and the
amount of science known to the educated. It abounds in sound morals, and
its author might have sate at the feet of Adam Smith for the orthodoxy of
his political economy. He is not entirely free from the credulity of his
age and his account of Ireland will match anything to be found in Sir John
Mandeville. Here we are told of an island on which nothing rots, of another
on which nothing dies, of another on one-half of which devils alone reside,
of wonderful monsters and animals, and of miracles the strangest ever
wrought. He invents nothing. What he relates of Ireland he states to have
found in books, or to have derived from hearsay. The following extract must
therefore be taken as a specimen of Irish Folk-lore in the twelfth
century:--
"There is also one thing, he says, that will seem wonderful, and it
happened in the town which is called Kloena [Cloyne]. In that town
there is a church which is dedicated to the memory of a holy man called
Kiranus. And there it happened one Sunday, as the people were at
prayers and heard mass, that there descended gently from the air an
anchor, as if it had been cast from a ship, for there was a cable to
it, and the fluke of the anchor caught in the arch of the church-door,
and all the people went out of church, and wondered, and looked up into
the air after the cable. There they saw a ship floating above the
cable, and men on board; and next they saw a man leap overboard, and
dive down to the anchor to free it. He appeared, from the motions he
made with both hands and feet, like a man swimming in the sea. And when
he reached the anchor, he endeavoured to loosen it, when the people ran
forwards to seize the man. But the church in which the anchor stuck
fast had a bishop's chair in it. The bishop was present on this
occasion, and forbade the people to hold the man, and said that he
might be drowned just as if in water. And immediately he was set free
he hastened up to the ship, and when he was on board, they hauled up
the cable and disappeared from men's sight; but the anchor has since
laid in the church as a testimony of this."