3-078-306 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Mr. Frederick York Powell, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, 1895. Photo by Russell and Sons. 'At Rugby he first acquired the taste for Icelandic literature. He read all through Dasent's "Saga of Burnt Njal" on the counter of Billington's bookshop, and afterwards bought the volume...At twelve years of age the new Professor went to Paris, where he spent six winters...The years in Paris made Mr. Powell an accomplished French linguist...His next excursion into the Icelandic Sagas was to read the Orkney Saga in the original. Shortly afterwards he met Vigfusson...Their first production was the history of the Old Northern Literature prefixed to the Sturlunga Saga; their Reading Book of Icelandic followed; then together they produced "Corpus Poeticum Boreale," the two great volumes of which appeared in 1883. Mr. York Powell is at present finishing "Origines Islandiae," which they were working on, and which was in great part done at the time of Vigfusson's death...[His] history-books for children...are, indeed, at once so simple and so picturesque as to interest clever or dull children...Mr. Powell has been Civil Service Examiner at Oxford and Cambridge, [and] Examiner for the Indian Civil Service'. From "Illustrated London News", 1895.