THE LITERATURE AND ROMANCE OF NORTHERN EUROPE CONSTITUTING A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE OF SWEDEN, WITH COPIOUS SPECIMENS OF THE MOST CELEBRATED HISTORIES, ROMANCES, POPULAR LEGENDS AND TALES, OLD CHIVALROUS COLBURN AND CO., PUBLISHERS, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1852. PREFACE. WE have stated, in the body of the work, our surprise at the comparative ignorance which has prevailed in this country of the literature of a people so allied to us by race and tone of mind as the Scandinavians. Many circumstances of late years have indicated a tendency to the cultivation of a better acquaintance with what is so worthy of being known. We trust that these volumes, the result of no ordinary labour amongst whole libraries of Northern works, will do much towards advancing that acquaintance and the opening up of a new and extensive source of intellectual pleasure amongst English readers. There was a time, and not so very distant, when German authors, now so fully estimated, were as much neglected here; but we believe no such instance of mingled ignorance and ludicrous conceit, as it regards a foreign literature, is to be found as the following, within anything like so recent a period. Ritson, the philologist and literary antiquary, in his introductory dissertation to "Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës," published in 1802, is excessively irate that the Scandinavians should have any ancient literature or mythology at all, and abuses Mallet and Bishop Percy |