In the middle of the nineteenth century, the young American student Daniel Willard Fiske left college to embark on a sojourn in Denmark and Sweden that would eventually lead, in 1879, to a lengthy visit to Iceland. By then, Fiske had become Cornell University's first university librarian and professor of Northern European languages, and had established the foremost book collection in private hands in America on Iceland and the medieval Norse world.

Kristín Bragadóttir explores in depth Fiske's fascination with Iceland and the Icelanders, with their language and literature, describing with admiration the solicitude this remarkable American intellectual, brilliant linguist, astute bibliophile, and enthusiastic chess advocate manifested for the remote island community as it fledged from a distant Danish dependency into a nation on the path of cultural and political self-determination.