astronomer Niels Horrebow visited Iceland in the middle of the eighteenth century and wrote: Their only pastime, when they treat themselves to it now and then, consists of bellowing out their old Icelandic songs about their heroes, of which they know quite a few. They set these to a sort of melody, which is rather primitive, since they neither know anything about music nor have any instruments. . . (Niels Horrebow, Tilforladelige Efterretninger Orn Island, Copenhagen 1752.) About fifty years later, Magnus Stephensen, a lawyer and disciple of enlightenment and the owner of probably the only organ in Iceland at that time, sat down and wrote a summary of the eighteenth century - ... a century in which the country had experienced 43 years of famine because of cold winters, pack ice, lack of fish, shipwrecks, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, epidemics and pestilence among men and livestock.. . (Magnus Stephensen, Island i det 18de Aarh., Copenhagen 1808, p. 224) He wrote that the people sang mostly hymns or rimur . . . or sing in never-ending monotony the most unrhythmic warrior songs, perhaps best suited to chase away evil spirits wherever they are expected to haunt. And in the absence of anything better, the country folk seem to derive much pleasure from these songs .... (Magnus Stephensen, p. 224) Musical instruments seem to have been very rare during these centuries. Magnus Stephensen certainly owned an organ (a similar instrument is said to have been imported from Norway as early as the fourteenth century). A number of other instruments are mentioned in different contexts. 10

(1) Front Board
(2) Front Board
(3) Front Flyleaf
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