A fragment of the most famous work of Jón lærði Guðmundsson (Jón the Learned, 1574–1658); despite his by-name, Jón was self-taught. The manuscript is the author’s original, written some time in 1640–1644, and it has many pictures of whales: some of them accurate likenesses, while others owe more to the author’s imagination. Jón’s text was admired and much copied in later centuries. One of Jón’s first writings was a powerful poem against a malicious ghost. Although the poem won him popularity among lay people, the Church took a dim view of it. This, among other things, led to Jón being sentenced to exile, for most of the time on a deserted island in the east of Iceland.
Click the picture to view the manuscript.