17 



THORKELIN, GRIM JONSSON. 



THORLAKSSOK, JJN. 



U 



Pamblad, in his Swedish biography of Thorild, "resembliug that of 

 Thomas Carlyle, who iu mind is near akin to Thorild." The ideas 

 however of Thorild, which include, among other things, the destruc- 

 tion by fire of all great cities, as " nests of folly and tyranny," have a 

 far more striking resemblance to those of the wildest of the French 

 revolutionists, which they have the merit, such as it is, of anticipating. 

 It was in September 1788 that Thorild came to England, where he 

 remained a year and a half, so that he must have been in London at 

 the time of the ovitbreak of -the French revolution, yet he seems to 

 have made no movement to transfer himself to Paris. At first he was 

 delighted with England, and wrote from Scarborough, " Almost every- 

 thing here is of its kind the best I have seen, the beer, the theatre, the 

 letters, the sermons." As might be expected his opinions soon changed, 

 and for the rest of hia life he wrote of the country with great con- 

 tempt. " The whole government of England," he told Tham in 1790, 

 " is a balance of violence and justice, of sense and nonsense, of truth 

 and falsehood, which is indeed necessary in the idea of a balance." 

 While here he published two- pamphlets in English, ' The Sermon of 

 Sermons on the Impiety of Priests and the Fall of Religion,' London, 

 1789 ; and ' Pure Heavenly Religion restored," London, 1790 ; the 

 one an attack on religion in general, the other, not very consistently, 

 a defence of the doctrines of Swedenbflrg. Both of them fell still-born 

 from the press. Some others, ' On the Dignity of a free Death, with a 

 view to state that grand right of man, by a Druid/ and ' The Royal 

 Moon, or on Insanity in Politics,' appear not to have been printed, 

 and ' Cromwell, a sketch of an epic poem,' was left unfinished, but was 

 afterwards printed in Sweden by Geijer. It begins 



" Great is the man I sing 1 , and bold my theme, 

 A dread to feeble souls as lightning's gleam 

 In midnight, or loud thunderings' solemn roar," 



and shows, ainid occasional incorrectness, a power over English poetical 

 language very rarely attained by a foreigner. Cromwell was Thorild's 

 favourite hero another point of resemblance to Carlyle. The Swede, 

 as might be anticipated, hailed with delight the outbreak of the 

 French revolution, though, as we have seen, he kept at a safe distance 

 from it. He continued to express his warm admiration of its progress, 

 and his detestation of those who thought otherwise, for some years, till 

 he was suddenly converted to an anti-revolutionist by the Reign of 

 Terror. On his return to Sweden in 1790 he resumed his literary 

 labours, and not long after the death of Gustavus III., who was always 

 his admirer, issued a new edition of a former publication, an ' Essay 

 on the Freedom of the Public Mind,' with a dedication to the Duke 

 of Sudermania, then regent, afterwards Charles XIII., in which these 

 words occurred, " Give us then the freedom of the public mind, 

 honestly and fairly, before it is taken with blood and violence." For 

 this passage and some others of similar tendency Thorild was brought 

 to trial on a capital charge, but was finally only sentenced to four 

 years' banishment. This trial, which terminated in February 1739, 

 was at once the most conspicuous and the most honourable incident in 

 Thorild's life, he showed great coolness during its progress, and wrote 

 a series of poems in prison. He removed to Greifswald, then part of 

 Swedish Pomerania, and before his year's of banishment were over, 

 was appointed by tho Swedish government librarian of the university 

 there, and afterwards a professor. The rest of his life was spent 

 quietly at Greifswald, where he died on the 1st of October 1808. 



A collection of the works of Thorild, ' Thomas Thorild's Simlade 

 Skrifter ' was published in 3 vols. at Upsal and Stockholm, between 

 1819 and 1824, under the editorship of Geijer, who took the objection- 

 able liberty of leaving out such passages as he thought ought not to have 

 been written. One volume consists of poems, the two others of 

 literary criticism and essays on general subjects. As a literary critic 

 the most striking peculiarity of Thorild was his boundless admiration 

 of Ossian. Those who feel a curiosity as to his philosophical opinions 

 in general, may find ample information in the 'Svenskt Pantheon,' 

 and in Atterbom's 'Svenska Siare och Skalder' (Swedish Seers and 

 Bards). While at Greifswald he became the friend of Herder, the 

 German philosopher, whose works were left to him to edit. 



THORKELIN, GRIM JONSSON, a learned Icelander, was born in 



1749, according to a life in the 'Monthly Magazine' for 1803, in 



1750, according to Jens Worm, and on the 8th of October 1752, 

 according to Erslew, who refers to the accounts in. the ' Monthly 

 Magazine,' and Worm, as "autobiographies of Thorkelin." Many 

 similar discrepancies occur in the accounts of other circumstances of 

 his early life, but they are hardly worth the trouble of pointing out. 

 According to a rescript of the King of Denmark, issued in 1759, one 

 of the best scholars in Iceland was to be selected every year to be sent 

 to Denmark, and educated at the public expense, and the choice of 

 Bishop Finn Jonsson [JONSSON] fell in 1770 upon Thorkelin. As his 

 chest was too weak to allow him to become a preacher, he took to the 

 study of law, and combined with it that of antiquities. He soon dis- 

 tinguished himself by the publication of several Icelandic works 

 which he edited, among others of the ' Eyrbiggia-Saga,' of which an 

 abstract was afterwards published by Walter Scott. He obtained 

 various posts in connection with the Arna-Magnsean Commission, the 

 Secret Archives, and other learned establishments of Copenhagen ; 

 received in 1783 the title of Professor Extraordinary, and in 1786 he 

 was sent to England, mainly at the King of Denmark's expense, on a 



BIOG. DIY, VOL. VI. 



tour of antiquarian research, which was to lart for four yearn, and 

 ultimately extended to five. In England he made himself acquainted 

 with many of the distinguished literary men of the time, Pinkerton, 

 Horace Walpole, and Macpheraon, the translator of ' Osiian ' included! 

 He was presented to King George III., and at his denire, made a 

 selection of Danish literature for the library then at Buckingham 

 House, now in the British Museum. The 389th volume in the manu- 

 scripts of that library is a ' Catalogue consisting of 2085 book* relative 

 to the Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic Literature and 

 Philosophy, written by the natives, and published within the borders 

 of Scandinavia. A collection made for purpose [on purpose (?) or for a 

 purpose (?)] during a time of more than twenty years.' Both the col- 

 lection and catalogue were made by Thorkelin, and most of the book* 

 were acquired for the royal library. He made a tour in Ireland, and 

 also a tour on the Scottish coast, of which he published an account in 

 English in 1790, in some letters to the ' Public Advertiser.' This wag 

 not his only contribution to English literature. In 1788 he published 

 an ' Essay on the Slave Trade,' and also ' Fragments of English and Irish 

 history in the ninth and tenth century, translated from the original 

 Icelandic, and illustrated with some notes,' the latter work forming the 

 48th number of Nichols's ' Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica.' The 

 selections from the Icelandic sagas are interesting, but the translation 

 is far from clear, and is vague and inflated in style. Another English 

 work by Thorkelin which ran to a second edition, a ' Sketch of the 

 character of his royal highness the Prince of Denmark, to which is 

 added a short view of tho present state of literature and the polite 

 arts in that country ,' London, 1791, was translated into Danish, and 

 led to a paper war with other Danish writers, who complained of 

 some of its statements. The most important result of Tborkelin's visit 

 to England however was the copy that he took of an ancient Anglo- 

 Saxon poem in the Cottonian library, to which attention had been 

 called nearly a hundred years before, in Wanley's 'Catalogue,' 

 published in Hickes's ' Thesaurus,' but which had remained all the 

 time unedited by the learned of Britain. When in 1791 ho re- 

 turned to Denmark on his nomination as Geheime-Archivarius, or 

 Keeper of the Secret Archives, it seems to have been his intention to 

 publish this work without delay, but his biographer in the ' Monthly 

 Magazine' for 1803, concludes his narrative by the statement that 

 " in the course of a year after his return, he married a rich widow in 

 the brewing line, which he conducts at this day," and business seems 

 to have interfered with literature. Thorkelin had however prepared 

 it for publication at the time of the unexpected attack on Copenhagen, 

 in 1807, when his translation of the poem perished with his house and 

 library under the English bombardment. He was encouraged to take 

 up the work again by Counsellor von Billow, and finally the poem and 

 translation were published together in one quarto volume at Copen- 

 hagen in 1815, at von Billow's expense, under the singular title of 

 ' De Danorum Rebus Gestis Seoul. III., IV., Poema Danicum Dialecto 

 Anglo-Saxonica.' This is the poem which has since become so cele- 

 brated under the name of ' Beowulf.' It will be seen that in the title 

 Thorkelin calls it a Danish poem in the Anglo-Saxon dialect, and in 

 his preface his language would lead a reader to conclude that the 

 poem was in Icelandic. W T hat he can have meant by this it is not 

 easy to say, but the only merit of his edition is that of having called 

 attention to this very interesting relic of ancient literature. " 1 am 

 most reluctantly compelled to state," says Kemble in his edition of 

 Beowulf (London, 1833), "that not five lines of Thorkelin's edition can 

 be found in succession in which some gross fault either in the tran- 

 script or the translation does not betray the editor's utter ignorance 

 of the Anglo-Saxon language." Thorkelin died on the 4th of March 

 1829, at Copenhagen, alter long suffering from ill health. A full and 

 accurate list of his works is given in Erslew's ' Forfalter Lexikon.' 

 Among them we find a "Proof that the Irish at the time of the 

 Eastmen's arrival in Ireland in the 8th century, deserve a distin- 

 guished place among the most enlightened nations of Europe at that 

 period," written in Danish, and published in the Transactions of the 

 Royal Society for the Sciences in 1794. 



THORLAKSSON, JON, the Icelandic translator of 'Paradise Lost,' 

 was born on the 13th of December 1744, at Selardal, near Arnarfjord, 

 the son of a priest who was afterwards dismissed from the priesthood. 

 Thorlaksson himself incurred a similar punishment in 1772; a second 

 bastard child having been sworn to him he was dismissed from being 

 priest of Grunnarik, and deprived of holy orders. Fortunately for 

 him, Olaf Olafsson obtained in the following year from the king of 

 Denmark the privilege of establishing a printing office at Hrappsey in 

 Iceland, and Thorlaksson, who would otherwise probably have been 

 reduced to starvation, procured employment as corrector of the press. 

 Though he had never left his native island, he had received a good 

 classical education during three years spent at the school of Skalholt, 

 then the Icelandic capital ; and he assisted in translating into Latin 

 the Annals of Biorn of Skardso, perhaps the most distinguished pro- 

 duction of the Hrappsey press. His learning won him favour : he 

 married the daughter of a peasant, who was partner with Olafsson in 

 the printing-office, and in 1780 he was restored to the priesthood, but 

 with the reservation that ho was never to officiate in the diocese of 

 Skalholt. It was eight years later before he was presented to the 

 living of Bcegisa in the north of Iceland, the value of which was some- 

 what under seven pounds sterling a year, and reduced by hia having 







