Konráð Gíslason

Konráð Gíslason (3 July 1808 – 26 January 1891) was an Icelandic grammarian and philologist, and one of the Fjölnismenn, a group of Icelandic intellectuals who spearheaded the revival of Icelandic national consciousness in the 19th century.

Konráð was born in Langamýri in Skagafjörður, Iceland. He was the oldest child of chronicler Gísli Konráðsson and his wife Efemía Benediktsdóttir. In his early years he was instructed in Danish, arithmetic and Latin by pastor Jón Konráðsson and his daughter, but otherwise received no formal schooling, herding sheep on his father's farm.

At the age of 17 Konráð travelled south to seek employment in the fisheries, and worked in Álftanes over the summer as a manual labourer for Hallgrímur Scheving, a teacher at the Bessastaðir school. Soon Hallgrímur called on his young employee to assist him in philological analysis of medieval Icelandic texts and taught him Latin. Konráð proved a gifted pupil and Hallgrímur obtained a stipend for him to study at Bessastaðir.

In 1831, Konráð finished his education at Bessastaðir and travelled to Denmark to study at the University of Copenhagen. He initially studied jurisprudence but soon abandoned the law to focus on Nordic and Icelandic philology.

Jónas Hallgrímsson, Brynjólfur Pétursson and Tómas Sæmundsson had been his fellow students at both Bessastaðir and the University of Copenhagen. In 1834, the four of them—collectively known as the Fjölnismenn—founded the Icelandic journal Fjölnir and published the first issue in the following year. Later, in 1847, Konráð and Brynjólfur were the first to publish the poems of Jónas Hallgrímsson.

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