Gripla - 20.12.2011, Side 68

GRIPLA68
In this respect, the present edition proves to be no exception, many
of the restorations of single or adjoining letters, which today could only
be conjectural given the damaged state of the leaf, being also based on
Larsson’s text. But I have carefully scrutinized the relevant page of the
manuscript – which has caused some different readings and new conjectur-
al restorations to be suggested –, and in the textual notes here appended,
not only Larsson’s readings but also Kölbing’s ‘interpretations’ have been
taken into account (with the exception of his insertions of syntactic punc-
tuation and of marks for syllabic division), in order to make clear – as far
as possible – what was fully or partly ‘readable’ in the last decades of the
19th century on our manuscript page, and what was tentatively restored by
the editors. It is a fact that neither Kölbing nor Larsson distinguished in
their printed texts fully conjectural restorations from uncertain or partial
readings of single letters; in the present edition, all the letters and tex-
tual sequences now definitely lost in the damaged parts of the leaf appear
within square brackets. Whether some of them were possibly (half-)pre-
served in Kölbing’s and Larsson’s time is discussed in the textual notes. In
the standard Old Icelandic transcription of the same text, which follows in
order to offer a more convenient basis for the English translation and the
commentary, only proper conjectural restorations are enclosed in square
brackets.
Editorial procedures and conventions in the text printed below are
as follows. Line division on the manuscript page is marked by a vertical
bar | with progressive line number indication; end of page is marked by a
double vertical bar ||. Unambiguous abbreviations are expanded in italics.
Superscript letters are enclosed in ⸌ ⸍. Damaged, missing or only partially
preserved letters are enclosed in square brackets [ ]. Illegible or missing let-
ters are reconstructed in the text wherever the readings are unproblematic;
readings by nineteenth-century editors are discussed in the notes. Text
lost in the damaged sections of the page is indicated by 0000 (the number
of noughts corresponding roughly to the letters lost in the gap regardless
Wolfgang Lange, Studien zur christlichen Dichtung der Nordgermanen 1000–1200, Palaestra.
Untersuchungen aus der deutschen und englischen Philologie und Literaturgeschichte 222
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), 257–258 (text of the two sermon fragments
about the allegorical interpretations of the ship in standard Old Icelandic, with some notes
appended).