This poem, the _Image du Monde_,[456] destined to be read for over three centuries, was decidedly the most important of the many works that felt the influence of the _De imagine mundi_. Like its Latin predecessor, it is an attempt at the popularization of universal knowledge. The work of popularization, however, was here carried to the stage of translation into a popular tongue, which rendered the book available to a much broader circle of readers. The style was vivid and not lacking in originality, and the subject matter contained sufficient of the grotesque and unexpected to assure the poem a long-lived success. Though the question of authorship and exact date is a somewhat perplexing one, it seems likely that the _Image du Monde_ was partially composed in Metz in 1245 or 1247 by a certain Gossouin and within the following two or three years was added to either by Gossouin himself or by a certain Walter of Metz, to whom the entire work has occasionally been attributed.[457] Prior, however, to the composition of the second verse redaction by Gossouin or Walter, the poem had been put into a prose form,[458] from which translations were subsequently made into Hebrew, Judeo-German, and English (the last by Caxton in 1480). “KONUNGS-SKUGGSJÁ” From the very end of our period there dates an Icelandic dialogue of more or less encyclopedic scope, a work which might well be called a northern counterpart of the _De imagine mundi_. This _Konungs-Skuggsjá_, or _King’s Mirror_,[459] written about the year 1250 or perhaps as late as 1260, contains chapters that reveal to us something of the status of Scandinavian knowledge of the geography and natural phenomena of Iceland, Greenland, and the Arctic seas. But, like the Sagas, so far as we know, it was not translated into Latin or into the vernacular tongues, and the type of knowledge contained in it remained until the great age of discovery virtually the exclusive property of the peoples of Iceland and of the far north of Europe.[460] GREAT ENCYCLOPEDIAS OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY