Guðbrandur Vigfusson

Guðbrandur Vigfússon, known in English as Gudbrand Vigfusson, (13 March 1827 – 31 January 1889) was one of the foremost Scandinavian scholars of the 19th century.

He was born of an Icelandic family in Breiðafjörður. He was brought up, until he went to a tutor's, by his kinswoman Kristín Vigfússdóttir, to whom, he records, he owed not only that he became a man of letters but almost everything. He was sent to the old school at Bessastaðir and (when it moved there) at Reykjavík. In 1849, already a fair scholar, he came to Copenhagen University as a bursarius (bursar) in the Regense College.

After his student course, he was appointed stipendiarius by the Arna-Magnaean trustees, and worked for fourteen years in the Arna-Magnaean Library until, as he said, he knew every scrap of old vellum and of Icelandic written paper in that whole collection.

In 1866, he settled in Oxford, which he made his home for the rest of his life. He held the office of Reader in Scandinavian at Oxford University (a post created for him) from 1884 till his death. He was made a Jubilee Doctor of Uppsala in 1877, and received the Danish order of the Dannebrog in 1885.

Guðbrandur died of cancer on 31 January 1889. He was buried in St. Sepulchre's Cemetery, Oxford, on 3 February, 1889.

He was an excellent judge of literature, reading most European languages well and being acquainted with their classics. His memory was remarkable, and if the Eddic poems had ever been lost, he could have written them all down from memory. He spoke English well, with a strong Icelandic accent. He wrote a beautiful, distinctive and clear hand, in spite of (or because of) the thousands of lines of manuscript copying he had done in his early life.

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