gantyr_.--Fals woman, thou dost not understand, that thou speakest
foolishly of that, in which thou dost rejoice, for Tirfing shall, if
thou wilt beleive me, maid, destroy all thy offspring.

_Hervor_.--I must go to my seamen, here I have no mind to stay longer.
Little do I care, O Royall friend, what my sons hereafter quarrell
about.

_Angantyr_.--Take and keep Hialmars bane, which thou shalt long have and
enjoy, touch but the edges of it, there is poyson in both of them, it is
a most cruell devourer of men.

_Hervor_.--I shall keep, and take in hand, the sharp sword which thou
hast let me have: I do not fear, O slain father! what my sons hereafter
may quarrell about.... Dwell all of you safe in the tombe, I must be
gon, and hasten hence, for I seem to be, in the midst of a place where
fire burns round about me.

One can well understand, who handles the ponderous _Thesaurus_, why the
first English lovers of Old Norse were antiquarians. "The Awakening of
Angantyr" is literally buried in this work, and only the student of
Anglo-Saxon prosody would come upon it unassisted, since it is an
illustration in a chapter of the _Grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et
Moeso-Gothicae_. Students will remember in this connection that it was
a work on poetics that saved for us the original Icelandic _Edda_. The
Icelandic skald had to know his nation's mythology.

THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811).

The title of Chapter XXIII in Hickes' work indicates that even among
learned doctors mistaken notions existed as to the relationship of the
Teutonic languages. It took more than a hundred years to set the error
right, but in the meanwhile the literature of Iceland was becoming
better known to English readers. To the French scholar, Paul Henri
Mallet (1730-1807), Europe owes the first popular presentation of
Northern antiquities and literature. Appointed professor of
belles-lettres in the Copenhagen academy he found himself with more time
than students on his hands, because not many Danes at that time
understood French. His leisure time was applied to the study of the
antiquities of his adopted country, the King's commission for a history
of Denmark making that necessary. As a preface to this work he
published, in 1755, an _Introduction a l'Histoire de Dannemarc ou l'on
traite de la Religion, des Lois, des Moeurs et des Usages des Anciens
Danois_, and, in 1756, the work in the list on a previous page. In this
second book was the first translation in