In addition to all his other work, Dasent wrote constantly for the Quarterly and the Edinburgh, and the principal literary periodicals, including the now defunct Fraser's Magazine, of which he was at one time offered the editorship.
Having been approached by the representatives of Richard Cleasby, who had been for years engaged in collecting materials for an Icelandic-English Dictionary, Dasent warmly interested himself in the task of completing the work. He brought Gúdbrandr Vígfússon, an Icelandic scholar of great industry and intelligence, already well-known for his labours in the field of his native literature, over to England to complete the final revision and arrangement of the manuscripts, and was successful, through the instrumentality of Liddell, in inducing the University of Oxford to bring out the work at the Clarendon Press. For this great undertaking Dasent wrote the introduction and also the life of Richard Cleasby—his only experiment in contemporary biography which has come down to us in book form.
The first edition of Burnt Njal, a work of which we gladly repeat the deliberate judgment of a distinguished American writer that "it is unsurpassed by any existing monument in the narrative department of any literature ancient or modern,"[1] appeared in 1861.
He had conceived the notion of giving an English dress to the Njal's Saga so early as in 1843, but, as the preface informs us, it was destined to rank among those things which, begun in youth, must wait for their com-
- ↑ See The Saturday Review, vol. xi. p. 429.
