Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík

Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík (1705–1779), also known as Jón Grunnvíkingur or Grunnavíkur-Jón, was an Icelandic scholar born in Grunnavík, Westfjords, northwestern Iceland. He traveled to Copenhagen in the autumn of 1726 and worked as an assistant to the Icelandic philologist Árni Magnússon for the last three years of Magnússon's life. Ólafsson became the first scholar to receive the stipend from the Arnamagnæan Fund and spent a significant portion of his scholarly life with the collection, which was housed in the attic of Trinity Church in Copenhagen. His scholarly contributions include an extensive, unpublished Icelandic dictionary and a 1732 work titled *Runologia*, which is a treatise on runology. A notable event in his life was the Copenhagen Fire of 1728, during which the original manuscript of the *Heiðarvíga saga* and a copy made by Ólafsson were destroyed. From memory, he reconstructed a summary of the saga, which is the only surviving account of its contents. He also documented the fire and the efforts to save Árni Magnússon's collection in his work, *Relatio of the Fire in Copenhagen in October 1728*. In recent times, a society known as *Góðvinir Grunnavíkur-Jóns* (The Friends of Grunnavíkur-Jón) has been instrumental in publishing many of Ólafsson's works for the first time. The character Jón Grindvicensis in Halldór Laxness's novel *Iceland's Bell* is based on Jón Grunnvíkingur.