Gripla - 20.12.2010, Page 148

GRIPLA148
mer er sagt at [herra] Grimr eigi hana’ [‘have Gauks saga Trandilssonar writ-
ten here; I am told that (Lord?) Grímr owns a copy of it’]. The identi-
fication with Grímr lögmaður is, however, at best an inspired guess by Jón
Helgason and the note it self is unfor tunately no longer legible.4
§ 2.
M is one of a handful of Old Icelandic manuscripts that enjoy iconic status.
The facsimile published by Ejnar Munksgaard in the early 1930s is huge
and heavy,5 and is a book intended not so much for study as to be revered
by enthusiasts for the culture of medieval Iceland. Its monumental format
symbolises the fact that M even in its present defective state is our largest
medieval collection of Íslendingasögur and skáldasögur, 11 sagas in all. Yet
there are reasons to believe that the extant manuscript does not fully repre-
sent the intentions of those who pro duced it. The book is presently
enclosed in two thick wooden boards to which the parchment quires have
been made fast by five spinal cords; this procedure was applied by the
Danish bookbinder Anker Kyster in 1928 and replicated by Birgitte Dall
and Mette Jakobsen at the Arnamagnæan conservation workshop in
Copenhagen in 1974. Around 1890 the quires were distributed in three
bound volumes, but prior to that date they had lain loose between the
boards, which according to Jón Sigurðsson and Kristian Kålund were for-
merly attached to each other by a strip of leather.6 In Kålund’s catalogue
4 Jón Helgason, “Gauks saga Trandils sonar,” Ritgerðakorn og ræðustúfar (Copenhagen: Félag
íslenskra stúdenta, 1959), 102–04 [rpt. from Heidersskrift til Gustav Indrebø på femtiårsdagen
(Bergen: Lunde, 1939)], where the affinity of the lost *Gauks saga with Njála is pointed out.
Nearly 30 years later Stefán Karlsson (Sagas of Icelandic Bishops, 27) was unable to verify the
doubtful word ‘herra’, and another 15 years later An drea de Leeuw van Weenen could see
even less at this place; in A Grammar of Möðruvallabók (Leiden: Research School CNWS,
2000), 27–28, she seems inclined to reject Jón Helgason’s reading altogether.
5 Einar Ól. Sveinsson (ed.), Möðruvallabók (Codex Mödruvallensis) (Copenhagen: Munks-
gaard, 1933).
6 In his incomplete and unpublished catalogue of the Arnamagnæan Collection Jón Sig-
urðsson wrote that “Codex er nu indlagt i tykke Spjæld med Skind ryg” (AM 394 fol., f.
135r, cf. § 5 with n. 41 below, my em phasis); this calls in question the much later testimony
of Jón Þorkelsson in Njála udg. efter gam le hånd skrifter, vol. II (Copenhagen: Det Kgl.
Nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab, 1889), 659, where it is stated that “Bog en er i gammel tid ble-
ven indbunden, men nu ere de gamle membran blade lösnede fra hverandre [...].” The latter
asser tion is not supported by concrete evidence.