Zoëga's A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic
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Preface Page 1
While it cannot be said that the study of Icelandic has been neglected in Britain, there can be no doubt that it might with advantage become much more general than it has been. There are several good reasons why it should be so. The Scandinavian influence was the earliest, and one of the strongest, of those outward forces which have gone to the making of modern English, and for the proper investigation and appreciation of this a knowledge of Icelandic is of the first importance. Not only does it supply a linguistic basis for such a study; it is also the source of much of the information necessary for the understanding of that period of British history. In itself, too, Old Icelandic literature, both in poetry and prose, presents a wealth of interesting material, which in some respects stands unrivalled among the literatures of mediaeval Europe, and without which our knowledge of the ancient North would be the merest shadow of what it is.
This important language and literature first became easily accessible to the English student with the publication (in 1869–74) of the Icelandic Dictionary begun by Richard Cleasby, and completed for the Clarendon Press by Gudbrand Vigfusson. This still remains the fullest record of Icelandic as a whole, although some portions of the older vocabulary have been more fully dealt with in later works. For beginners, however, and for those whose interests chiefly centre in the old Icelandic prose-writings, some more convenient and cheaper work has been greatly needed, and the present volume is intended to supply this want. In the main it is founded on the Oxford Dictionary, and has been compiled on the general principle of including all those words which the ordinary student of Icelandic is likely to meet with in the course of his reading. With the exception of the Edda poems, the purely poetic vocabulary has
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