Person1605 – 1675

Brynjólfur Sveinsson

Also called: Brynjolfur Sveinsson

Lutheran bishop of Skálholt, Iceland, and scholar, who acquired the Codex Regius in 1643 and sent it to King Frederick III of Denmark in 1662

Born in 1605, the son of a pastor, at Holt in Önundarfjörður in north-western Iceland, he studied at the University of Copenhagen and then headed a school at Roskilde in Denmark. In 1639 he became Lutheran bishop of Skálholt, serving until 1674. A scholar of Latin and Greek, he worked to collect old Icelandic manuscripts, acquiring the Codex Regius in 1643 and believing it to be the Edda of Sæmundr the Learned. He sent Flateyjarbók to King Frederick III of Denmark in 1656 and the Codex Regius in 1662. He died at Skálholt in 1675.

Show on the map

Where they went

Open the full map

OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors

1 related event

1
1270The Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda (Poetic Edda)related figure
Around the 1270s a manuscript collecting old poems of gods and heroes, the Codex Regius, was written in Iceland. It is almost the only source of the Poetic Edda — Völuspá, Hávamál and the rest. Bishop Brynjólfur of Skálholt acquired it in 1643 and sent it to the Danish king; it returned to Iceland in 1971.

Themes this person appears in

Norse MythologyAD 793 – 1876
From the world made of Ymir’s body through Odin’s runes, Thor’s adventures and the death of Baldr to Ragnarök and the rebirth of the world — Norse myth in story order, alongside the temple at Uppsala, the Oseberg ship, runestones, the Gosforth Cross, Snorri’s Edda, the Codex Regius and Wagner’s Ring