ïvi INTRODUCTION.

and 677 in the Arna-Magnaean collection, as well as the Sagas and legends contained
in the MSS. Nos. 623, 645, 655, and 656 in that collection*. In what may be called the
translations and adaptations from the Romance cycle, references and quotations were
made from the Alexanders Saga and the Strengleikar, as well as from the Flovents
Saga, the Elis Saga, the Bærings Saga, under the common head of Arn. M. 580, a MS.
which has not as yet been printed. These, with a few Deeds out of Finn Jónsson's
Historia Ecclesiastica, vol. i. and ii. reaching down to the year 1400, and some of the
Máldagar or Agreements of various monasteries in Iceland, complete the list of works
made use of in Cleasby's own materials and in the transcripts made from them at
Copenhagen after his death.

That they were quotations from a great body of works belonging to the best
age of Icelandic literature cannot be contested, but it is also undeniable that a mass
of works of the greatest importance to the philology of the language were entirely
omitted. It must ever be remembered that a Dictionary has to deal with words,
and not with literature, except as affording a matrix, so to speak, from which words
may be extracted. A very ignoble author may thus afford a very precious word ;
and a Dictionary, in the true sense of the word, must open her doors to all her
children of whatever age, whether of high or low degree, alike. Based on this
principle, we find that this Dictionary, besides embodying the whole vocabulary of
the poetic language, includes not only very many words contained in the modern,
language of Iceland, but also numberless quotations from Sagas and writings alto-
gether ignored in the Cleasby transcripts. Not to speak of particular MSS., such
as the Codex Regius, the Flateyjarbók, and Morkinskinna, we shall find a whole host
of works quoted, to which reference is never made in Cleasby's collections. Such are
the Barlaams Saga, the Legendary Olafs Saga, the Fagrskinna, the Tristrams Saga, the
Rómverja Saga, the Parcevals Saga, the Ivents Saga, the Thomas Saga Erkibiskups,
the Játvardar Saga, the Karlamagnús Saga, the Þiðreks Saga, the Saga of rorstein the
son of Sidu-Hall, and several others. Besides these, the end of the second volume and
the whole of the third volume of Norges Gamle Love, the Diplomatarium Norvagicum,
the remaining Sagas of the Bishops, and the Runic Inscriptions have been left unnoticed
in the Cleasby transcripts. If we add to this that the quotations from such standard
works as Landnáma, Eyrbyggja, Vatnsdæla, the Flóamanna Saga, the Rafns Saga, the
Laurentius Saga, the Arons Saga, the Kristni Saga, the Islendingabók, the Orkneyinga
Saga, the Mariu Saga, and many others were very scanty and imperfect,—and if we con-
sider that no extracts were made from the ancient poetical literature, not even from the
rhymed names of trees, fishes, birds, and nautical words, etc., in the Edda (Edda Gl.);
that there were no quotations from any prose work after A. D. 1400 or 1350; nor from
any work of the time of the Reformation downwards; and that no regard was had to
the modern living language, which in every nation remains a true Lexicographical Cor-
nucopia,—we must confess that a large field of unexplored country remained to cover.

* Nearly all these vellum fragments—in Cleasby's life-time mere black and torn shreds—have now been
published in the Maríu Sögur and the Postula Sogur by the learned industry of C. R. Unger in Christiania.