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 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.