Autograph Letter Signed (Chas. C. Rafn.') from the Danish antiquary Charles Christian Rafn to the Principal Librarian at the British Museum, Sir Henry Ellis.

Author: 
Professor Charles Christian Rafn (1795-1864), secretary of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen [Sir Henry Ellis (1777-1869), Principal Librarian, British Museum, 1827-56]
Publication details: 
Copenhagen; 24 October 1850.
£165.00
SKU: 9471

8vo, 3 pp. Bifolium. The letter, on both sides of the first leaf, runs to thirty-seven lines, with nine lines in Icelandic (in another hand?) on the recto of the second page. Fair, on aged paper, and laid down onto a mount by the reverse of the second leaf. The mount is captioned in a contemporary hand. The first part of the letter refers to a facsimile which Ellis has 'caused to be executed and transmitted hither'. Rafn has already received this 'from Mr. Worsaae'. It contains 'an extract possessing interest for us of Ottar's and Ulfstein's account of travels in the North'. He refers to a letter he has written to the Earl of Ellesmere, expressing a wish 'to obtain a facsimile of one of those pages in which mention is made of Eastland'. Describes the contents of a box he intends to 'dispatch to the library of the British Museum', on behalf of the Society. Rafn's great work is his 'Antiquitates Americanae' (1837), in which he put forward the theory that America was discovered by Scandinavians in the tenth century.