ongs-skugg-sio_ to have been
written from 1154 to 1164. Ericksen believes it not to be older than 1184;
while Suhm and Eggert Olafsen do not allow it to be older than the
thirteenth century. Rafn, and the modern editors of the _Groenlands
Historiske Mindesmaerker_, p. 266., vol. iii., accept the date given by
Finsen as the true one. From the text of the work we learn that it was
written in Norway, by a young man, a son of one of the leading and richest
men there, who had been on terms of friendship with several kings, and had
lived much, or at least had travelled much, in Helgeland. Rafn and others
believe the work to have been written by Nicolas, the son of Sigurd
Hranesoen, who was slain by the Birkebeiners on the 8th of September, 1176.
Their reasons for coming to this conclusion are given at full length in the
work above quoted. {336}

The whole of the _Kongs-skugg-sio_ is well worthy of being translated into
English. It may, indeed, in many respects, be considered as the most
remarkable work of the old northerns.

EDWARD CHARLTON.

Newcastle-on-Tyne, Oct 7. 1850.

If F.Q. will look into Halfdan Einersen's edition of _Kongs-skugg-sio_,
Soroee, 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 hearsa