Gripla - 20.12.2010, Side 160

GRIPLA160
that I would judge to be from the first half of the eighteenth cen tu ry, and
the title explicitly states that it is from M: ‘Drapa Eigils Skallagrimssonar
er hann orte um Arenbiorn hersir. Ex Membrana Magnæj’ (f. 17r1–2).
The text of Arinbjarnarkviða in ÍB 169 is closely related to that in AM
146 fol., a copy of Egils saga written by Ásgeir Jónsson after he had left
Denmark to work for the histo rian Torfæus. We have Árni Magnússon’s
word for it that the poem in AM 146 was borrowed from a transcript he
had sent to Torfæus. Had the latter contained the last three lines that
Finnur Jónsson was able to read on f. 99v in M, and that are also transmit-
ted in ÍB 169, we should expect Ásgeir Jónsson to have included them, but
he did not. Two explanations seem possible: (a) these lines had not been
read under Árni Magnússon’s auspices, and ÍB 169 is an independent copy
of the original in M—perhaps revising Ásgeir’s text in AM 146, in which
case it must postdate the transfer of Torfæus’s manuscripts to Denmark
after his death in 1719; (b) they had indeed been read, but Árni found the
text doubtful and suppressed it in the copy he sent to Norway—in which
case ÍB 169 may be a sister text of AM 146 or even, if early enough, its
source. A more thorough treatment of this problem is clearly needed.
Arinbjarnarkviða is not the only case in which Árni Magnússon may
have refrained, as other students certainly did, from transmitting text in M
that was in fact capable of being deciphered. It was mentioned earlier that
Fóstbrœðra saga must have continued through 1–2 quires after the muti-
lated quire 25, but the paper manuscripts of the M-text of this saga do not
all end at the same place. Björn K. Þórólfsson and Jónas Kristjánsson37
provide the following data:
Gripla, 7–17]. See however Bjarni Einarsson (as previous note) for what he showed to be
the text of Arin bjarn ar kviða from 169 as inter po lated into Egla in the saga anthology AM
Accessoria 28, written in Ice land in the second half of the eighteenth century. — Other
items gathered together in 169 include a transcript of Sona torrek from about 1700 (f. 16),
‘Þáttur af Aununde Tre-fót’ mainly in the hand of Árni Magnússon’s mater nal grandfather,
the Rev. Ketill Jörundsson (ff. 50[51]–58r), and a scientific treatise by the Rev. Guðmundur
Jónsson († 1836; ff. 85–96). Printed catalogue description in Páll Eggert Ólason, Skrá
um handritasöfn Lands bókasafns ins, vol. II (Reykjavík: Landsbókasafn Íslands, 1927), pp.
770–71, no. 6324.
37 Björn K. Þórólfsson, Fóstbrœðra saga, introduction; Jónas Kristjánsson, Um Fóstbræðrasögu
(Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1972), here 16–18 and (for the dating of Ásgeir
Jónsson’s copies) 25.