If F.Q. will look into Halfdan Einersen's edition of _Kongs-skugg-sio_,
Soröe, 1768, the first time it was printed, he will find in the editor's
preliminary remarks all that is known of the date and origin of the work.
The author is unknown, but that he was a Northman and lived in Nummedal, in
Norway, and wrote somewhere between 1140 and 1270, or, according to Finsen,
about 1154; and that he had in his youth been a courtier, and afterwards a
royal councillor, we infer from the internal evidence the work itself
affords us. _Kongs-skugg-sio_, or the royal mirror, deserves to be better
known, on account of the lively picture it gives us of the manners and
customs of the North in the twelfth century; the state of the arts and the
amount of science known to the educated. It abounds in sound morals, and
its author might have sate at the feet of Adam Smith for the orthodoxy of
his political economy. He is not entirely free from the credulity of his
age and his account of Ireland will match anything to be found in Sir John
Mandeville. Here we are told of an island on which nothing rots, of another
on which nothing dies, of another on one-half of which devils alone reside,
of wonderful monsters and animals, and of miracles the strangest ever
wrought. He invents nothing. What he relates of Ireland he states to have
found in books, or to have derived from hearsay. The following extract must
therefore be taken as a specimen of Irish Folk-lore in the twelfth
century:--

"There is also one thing, he says, that will seem wonderful, and it
happened in the town which is called Kloena [Cloyne]. In that town
there is a church which is dedicated to the memory of a holy man called
Kiranus. And there it happened one Sunday, as the people were at
prayers and heard mass, that there descended gently from the air an
anchor, as if it had been cast from a ship, for there was a cable to
it, and the fluke of the anchor caught in the arch of the church-door,