This day in history: Icelandic Historian Snorri Sturluson was assassinated on this day in 1241 by men claiming to be agents of the King of Norway. Most of what we know about Valhalla and the Valkyries, Odin and the Well of Wisdom, Thor and the twilight of the Gods, and the world tree Yggdrasil was written and preserved by Snorri Sturluson. His sagas represent a literary achievement which rivals Greek poems and epics which laid the foundation for J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy, which thus laid the foundation for today's fantasy literature. His Eddas have become, over time, the holy books of the Viking Gods. Think of how different the days of the week would be named had it not been to Snorri Sturluson.
He also provided an early account of the discovery of Vinland, which was perhaps Greenland or eastern Canada 1000 years ago. A place so warm they could grow grapes, hence the name Vinland.
Also, English novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins died on this day in 1889. He is best known for his books, The Woman in White (1859), and for The Moonstone (1868), which has been posited as the first modern English detective novel.
Agatha Christie lists Wilkie Collins as one of her influences. "Wilkie Collins is often considered the father of the modern detective novel. Although he wrote under the genre of 'sensation fiction' at his time, many scholars believe that Collins’s plot-focused, suspenseful, thrilling tales built the groundwork for detective fiction/crime fiction to come. The famous Sherlock Holmes series and character (1887) created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have drawn influences from The Moonstone. Sherlock Holmes, a detective with almost fantastical abilities, is based off the real-life Jack Whicher, and Collins’s Sergeant Cuff (and Mr. Murthwaite). Although Edgar Allen Poe is sometimes a competitor for first mystery author, there is no denying that Collins left a 'sensational' legacy in this genre of fiction." Source
A 1902 article in The Speaker describes Collins' work nicely: "The Moonstone has been called the best detective story ever written. It is, at once, much more and much less than that. The detective part of it is not only secondary, but, on the whole, ineffective. Sergeant Cuff is an admirable figure, but he is beaten in a way that would have shamed Sherlock Holmes. The power of the story lies in the suggestion of mystery, wonderfully sustained. The unaccountable disappearance of the diamond; the feeling of hostile influences around the chief persons of the story; the way in which the various points of view are expressed by Wilkie Collins’s favourite method-—not then out worn-—often trusting the telling of the tale to first one, then another of the characters—-these are the elements which give the novel its attractiveness. The story does not stand or fall by the complexity of its machinery; it has the interest of character. The heroine is excellently sketched, and there is real pathos in Rosanna Spearman and the luckless doctor‘s assistant who is successful in unravelling the many-sided puzzle. But it is in The Woman in White that we find Wilkie Collins’s greatest triumph in characterisation. The book grips one from the start; the touch of a hand laid slightly and suddenly on the shoulder of Walter Hartright as he was walking home from Hampstead at night thrills the reader as it thrilled him. We are held in the bonds of the mystery throughout. But even more than in the story are we interested in Count Fosco, a creation or which the greatest novelist might be proud. There is not a false touch in the conception. A magnificent, terrible villain, who yet cultivates the courtesies of life, the love of the arts, and has a true tenderness for his white mice and his canaries—he reminds us of the dark chronicles of the Latin race, of the suave criminals of fifteenth century Italy. Armadale is, perhaps, Wilkie Collins’s maturest work. In no other of his novels do we find the same ease, deftness of execution, and sureness of touch in dealing with his men and women. The fascinating adventuress Miss Gwilt——a near relation of Becky Sharp’s-—the country solicitor, Pedgift, Senior, and the easy-going 'hero,' Allan Armadale—-these present three distinct types, each drawn with equal power and fidelity to life. Allan Armadale, especially, is worthy of George Eliot."
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