Discoveries in the time of Alfred King of England, in the ninth century
of the Christian era.
INTRODUCTION.
In the midst of the profound ignorance and barbarism which overspread the
nations of Western Europe, after the dissolution of the Roman empire in the
West, a transient ray of knowledge and good government was elicited by the
singular genius of the great Alfred, a hero, legislator, and philosopher,
among a people nearly barbarous. Not satisfied with having delivered his
oppressed and nearly ruined kingdom from the ravages of the almost savage
Danes and Nordmen, and the little less injurious state of anarchy and
disorganization into which the weakness of the vaunted Anglo-Saxon system
of government had plunged England, he for a time restored the wholesome
dominion of the laws, and even endeavoured to illuminate his ignorant
people by the introduction of useful learning. In the prosecution of these
patriotic views, and for his own amusement and instruction, besides other
literary performances, he made a translation of the historical work of
Orosius into his native Anglo-Saxon dialect; into which he interwove the
relations of Ohthere and Wulfstan, of which hereafter, and such other
information as he could collect respecting the three grand divisions of the
world then known; insomuch, that his account of Europe especially differs
very materially from that of Orosius, of which he only professed to make a
translation.
Although Alfred only mounted the throne of England in 872, it has been
deemed proper to commence the series of this work with the discovery of
Iceland by the Nordmen or Norwegians, about the year 861, as intimately
connected with the era which has been deliberately chosen as the best
landmark of our proposed systematic History and Collection of Voyages and
Travels.
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