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were already illegible when the scribe of *M1 was at work,32 and further
deterioration had evidently occurred by the time that Eyjólfur Björnsson
copied Egla directly from M under the auspices of Árni Magnússon in
Copenhagen.33 Much more recently, the writing at the bottom of f. 61v
seems gradually to have faded away over the period of 40 years separating
the attempts by Jón Helgason and Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen to deci-
pher it.34 A similar process is observable over the centuries rather than
decades that elapsed between the pioneering efforts of Árni Magnússon to
recover the text of Arinbjarnar kviða on f. 99v and the renewed examina-
tions of that page by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Finnur Jónsson in the
second half of the nineteenth century. In 1860 Guðbrandur Vigfússon
could read not a few whole words and some isolated letters from the lower
half of col. 99vb; Finnur Jónsson’s transcript in his edition of 1886–88
ends about halfway down that col umn.35 On the other hand, the last three
lines reported by Finnur Jónsson are more complete than they are in
Guðbrandur Vigfússon’s transcript. In this case the younger scholar’s suc-
cess was pro bably due not so much to his having moistened the parchment
with distilled water—a practice for which he is nowadays ritually vilified by
conservationists—as to his having col lated these three lines with the text
given by Guðmundur Magnússon († 1798) in his edition of Egils saga pub-
lished posthumously by the Arnamagnæan Commission in 1809. Here the
lines in question are supplied from a copy of Arinbjarnarkviða lent to the
editor by Bishop Hannes Finnsson of Skálholt, now ff. 17–18 in a volume
of varia preserved as RLH ÍB 169 4to.36 The copy of the poem is in a hand
32 Bjarni Einarsson, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar vol. I, XXX–XXXI, XXXIV, XXXVIII.
33 Jón Helgason, “Bemærkninger til håndskriftet AM 460 4to,” Opuscula XII: 48–49. Eyjólfur
Björnsson was in Copenhagen between 1687 and 1689.
34 Cf. § 2, remarks on quire 7 with n. 11.
35 Bjarni Einarsson, Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, XXXIX–XLII with n. 21, and text (Tillæg I) 190.
In Gudbrand Vig fus son and F. York Powell (eds.), Corpvs Poeticvm Boreale, vol. I (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1883), 271, the writing on f. 99v is characterised as “the washed-out ghostly
marking on the bleak greasy page.” The touch of pathos in this description can probably be
laid at the door of York Powell.
36 Egils-saga, sive Egilli Skallagrimii vita (Copenhagen: [Det Arnamagnæanske Legat], 1809),
682–84; cf. 607 footnote, where ÍB 169 is described as an “old exemplar” (vetusto Exemplare)
and its fragment of the poem as “somewhat fuller” (aliquanto plenius) than the copy by
Ásgeir Jónsson. My knowledge of Guðmundur Magnússon’s debt to 169 derives from an
investigation made by Bjarni Einarsson in connection with Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, vol.
I, but not included in the introduction to that volume [it is now published in this issue of
MÖÐRUVALLABÓ K