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towards 780, and his birth may be placed a little before 770. He names his two preceptors, Eadfrid and Iglac (or Hyglac), and dedicates his poem, which is an account of the abbots and other eminent persons of the monastery in which he lived, to Egbert bishop of Lindisfarne, who held that see from 802 to 819. This poem is valuable chiefly as a document of history; but, though it has little merit, it is interesting as the only specimen we have of the Anglo-Latin poetry of that period. Ethelwolf gives the following account of his preceptor :

Tempore quo lector præclarus gaudia digna
Accumulat patris, Iglacus nomine dictus,
De quo jamdudum perstrinxi pauca relatu,
Anglorum de gente pios dum carmine quosdam
Jam cecini indoctus vilisque per omnia scriptor;
Quæ si quis cupiat cum gnaro noscere corde,
Currat et hæc sitiens se ulgosis mergat in undis,
Littera quo docti non docte carmina patris
Pompat, et aggreditur poterit quod dicere digne.
Hoc tantum versus præsens mihi cartula signet,
Quod mensam digitis dominus circumdedit almam,
Inque caput sancti peditat benedictio larga,
Nec oculis cernens cernit de pectore gnaro,
Spiritus atque pios carnis fraudatus ocellis,
Necnon atque nigros mentis prospexit ocellis.
Hunc iterum manibus præcelsum cingere regem,
Viderat atque animam fulgentem lumine solis
Mentis in excessum quidam confessor in Anglis.
Quæ si quis cupiat diligenter scire per orbem,
Prædictas quærens jam nunc se mergat in undas.

It would appear by these lines, that the history of his monastery was not the only work of Ethelwolf, but that he had previously composed a poem on some eminent monks of his time, in which he had given a longer account of his master Iglac. At the end of his poem, Ethelwolf gives the meaning in Latin of his own name,—

Hæc Lupus, alte Pater, stolido de pectore Clarus

Carmine composuit, corpore mente rogans.

Edition of Ethelwolf.

Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti. Sæculum IV. pars secunda, fol. Paris, 1680, pp. 304–321. Ethelwolfi Monachi Carmen de Abbatibus et viris piis Cœnobii S. Petri in Insula Lindisfarnensi, from a MS. at Cambridge.

DICUIL.

AT the end of the eighth century many English and Irish monks settled in France and Germany, some of whom gained celebrity as teachers, and probably were known among their contemporaries by their literary productions. Few of them have merited to be handed down to after times, and their writings were mostly works of little interest, which would scarcely have given them a claim to the title of English authors. There was, however, one writer of the beginning of the eighth century who deserves mention here, not only on account of the character of the book which bears his name, but also because it is one with which the Anglo-Saxons at a later period were probably familiar.

All that we know of Dicuil is gathered directly or by implication from his own book.* He appears to have been born in Ireland soon after the middle of the eighth century. His own observations show that he was from his youth greedy of information relating to foreign lands, and

* M. Letronne, in his 'Récherches' on Dicuil, has examined with much acuteness most of the passages of the treatise De Mensura Orbis Terræ which relate to its author, but it does not appear to have occurred to him that Dicuil might have been one of the numerous Irish monks settled in France in the eighth century.

+ Dicuil indicates his country very distinctly, circa nostram insulam Hiberniam, p. 37. Eremitæ ex nostra Scottia navigantes, p. 39. It is hardly necessary to observe that the present application of the name Scotia is comparatively modern. Letronne, Récherches, p. 24, supposes Dicuil to have been born between 755 and 760.

it is probable that, after visiting in his youth many of the British isles, he entered an Irish monastery in France to derive further instruction from his countryman Suibneus.† While Dicuil was attending the school of Suibneus, the latter received a visit from a monk named Fidelis, who had gone to the Holy Land in company with a number of pilgrims from England, and who gave Suibneus and his scholar an oral relation of his travels in that country and in Egypt, of which Dicuil has inserted a curious abstract in his book. It is distinctly stated that Fidelis sailed into the Red Sea by the canal which then communicated with it from the Nile; and as we know that that canal was finally blocked up by the khalif Abu Giafar Almansor in 767,§ it follows that the voyage of Fidelis must have taken place previous to that year, and his visit to Suibneus may have occurred within a few years afterwards. It seems

* Juxta insulam Britanniam, multæ aliæ, etc. . . . In aliquibus ipsarum habitavi, alias entravi, alias tantum vidi, alias legi. Dicuil, De Mens. Orb. p. 37.

+ Fidelis frater meo magistro Suibneo narravit coram me (cui, si profeci aliquid, post Deum imputo). De Mens. Orb. p. 24. Letronne enumerates seven Irishmen named Dicuil and twenty-four named Suibneus (Récherches, pp. 8, 9, 23). These names therefore must have been very common; and the circumstance of there being so many of the name mentioned shows that there may have been many others of whom we know nothing, and that it is by no means necessary to identify our Dicuil and Suibneus with any of them.

De Mens. Orb. pp. 24, 25. The old MSS. have, narravit. . . quod adorationis causa in urbe Hierusalem clerici et laici habitaria usque ad Nilum velificaverunt. Letronne corrects the faulty word to ab Hibernia, taking it for granted the clerici et laici were all Irishmen. We prefer the conjecture previously made, and correct it to a Britannia, because the corruption is in that case more easily explained. An earlier MS. perhaps had abitania in MSS. the contraction for ri is frequently mistaken for simple i, and in writings older than the twelfth century n and r are very easily mistaken for each other. It must also be remembered that Dicuil does not state that the travellers were Irishmen.

The history of this canal is discussed in a very satisfactory manner by Letronne, Récherches, pp. 11-22.

probable that Dicuil remained in France during the rest of his life. In 795, he met with some clerks who gave him important information concerning the islands to the north of Scotland, and who appear to have visited Iceland. The manner in which he speaks of the celebrated elephant presented by Haroun el Raschid to Charlemagne shows that he was then in France (i. e. between July, 802, and 810), and that he was a witness of the exhibition which excited so much popular curiosity on that occasion.† In the autumn of 825, when he was probably at least 70 years of age, Dicuil composed his treatise De Mensura Orbis Terræ ; we are justified in supposing that he was still in France, from the circumstances that the books he quotes were more likely to be found in that country than in Ireland, and that all the manuscripts of his treatise known to exist have evidently been derived from the libraries of monasteries situated within the kingdom of the Franks.

Perhaps Dicuil had himself become a teacher; for the tract De Mensura Orbis Terræ appears to have been designed for the instruction of his countrymen in France. It consists of a general description of the earth, as then known, founded upon an older work containing the measures of the Roman empire as they were said to have been taken under the Emperor Theodosius, which was in * De Mens. Orb. p. 38.

† Ut populi communiter regni Francorum elephantem in tempore imperatoris Karoli viderunt. De Mens. Orb. p. 48. The elephant is mentioned in the chronicles of the time. See Eginhard, Ed. Teulet, 1840, pp. 52, 254, 288.

We learn this from the verses at the conclusion of the book de Mens. Orb. Ter. pp. 70, 71.

Dicuil, accipiens ego tracta auctoribus ista, &c.

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great repute among the medieval geographers. With this he has interwoven extracts from other early writers, such as Pliny, Solinus, Orosius, Isidore, and Priscian, besides new information which he had collected in the course of his own inquiries. Dicuil's language is rude and perfectly destitute of ornament; but he exhibits an extensive acquaintance with books, and quotes Virgil, Lucan, and other Latin writers. We give as a specimen his account of the northern islands. It is the most curious part of his book, because it establishes two important points of history, first, that the Irish had made a settlement in Iceland in the eighth century, long before its discovery by the Northmen,* and, secondly, that the Feroe islands. (for Letronne has shown that those described by Dicuil can be no other,) had been inhabited by Irish monks nearly a hundred years before they were driven away by the incursions of the northern pirates at the beginning of the eighth century.

Thule ultima in qua, æstivo solstitio sole de Cancri sidere faciente transitum, nox nulla: brumali solstitio, perinde nullus dies.

Trigesimus nunc annus est a quo nuntiaverunt mihi clerici, qui a kalendis Februarii usque kalendas Augusti in illa insula manserunt, quod non solum in æstivo solititio, sed in diebus circa illud, in vespertina hora, occidens sol abscondit se quasi trans parvulum tumulum, ita ut nihil tenebrarum in minimo spatio ipso fiat; sed quicquid homo operari voluerit, vel pediculos de camisia abstrahere, tanquam in præsentia solis potest: et, si in altitudine montium ejus fuissent, forsitan nunquam sol absconderetur ab illis. In medio illius minimi temporis, medium noctis fit in medio orbis terræ ; et sic puto e contrario in hiemali solstitio, et in paucis diebus circa illud, auroram in minimo spatio in Thule apparere, quando in medio meridies fit orbis terræ. Idcirco mentientes falluntur, qui circum eam concretum fore mare scripserunt, et qui a vernali æquinoctio usque ad autumnale continuum diem sine nocte, atque ab autumnali versa vice usque ad vernale æquinoctium

* Letronne, Récherches, pp. 137, 138, shows that the details given so distinctly in Dicuil, can apply only to phenomena observable in the latitude of the southern part of Iceland, which leaves no doubt of the identity of Dicuil's Thule with that island. Iceland is said to have been discovered by the Northmen about 860. Dicuil gathered his information relating to it in 795.

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