Gripla - 20.12.2011, Page 76

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redundant numeral iii referring to the same colours of the rainbow;21 the
verbal phrase ok komet hefir adjoined to the present form kemr, in order to
precise the recurrent coming of God’s punishment in the history of man;
the noun phrases ...vitnisburðar guðligs sáttmáls ok friðsemdar þeirar in place
of a concise ...heits þess 22), and also in whole clauses (cf. ...líflát þeira er píndir
eru) or complex sentences, like in the last section of the text (cf. ...at vera
skyldi millim guðs ok mannkynsins meðan regnboginn seist ok nǫkkur misseri
síðan). It is possible that the Hauksbók recension represents an expanded
and better refined adaptation of an original text substantially similar to our
rainbow sermon, but the converse, i.e. the hypothesis that it is our copy
which offers a slightly shortened version of a common original instead,
must be taken into account here as a point of departure as well. The date
(first decade of the fourteenth century) and circumstances of the copying
of the ‘Book of Haukr’ vs. date and context of the ‘Physiologus manuscript’
copy may be of little or no relevance here, unless some new indications
about the preacher’s use of specific exegetical sources result from my
investigation, since the Hauksbók recension is certainly a copy from an
older manuscript.
Various other examples of textual variation are found in the Hauksbók
version, which are also of some interest, such as the occasional altering of
syntactic arrangement (cf. the inversion of fire and sulphur-flame in the
opening list of colours, while the proper, traditional order is respected later
in the text), or the careful slightly adversative use of conj. en in combina-
tion with adv. ei ‘not (ever)’ (...því fylgir blíðleikr mikill en ei torveldi; cf. ok eigi
in our text) in order to offer the contrastive point of what is found (great
mildness) and what is not (difficulty, troubles) in the baptism and – meta-
phorically – in the colour of water.
21 The reading of the numeral, written over the line with a downward stroke marking
insertion, is not at all certain. See Hauksbók, 174, note 3: “taltegnene er ikke ganske
regelmæssig skrevne, og de to første streger ligner et n, den tredje et z; der er dog næppe
grund til f. eks. at lese -boganz.”
22 It may be worth noting here that the sequence from ‘vítnís’ to ‘oc’ is written in the margin
of the page, with a cross as a reference mark both within the text and in the margin (cf.
Hauksbók, 175, note 1). The scribe must have left out part of a line, which is clear evidence
that he was copying from another manuscript.