Gripla - 20.12.2014, Blaðsíða 82

GRIPLA82
margins of the annals manuscript that he sent to Worm, which fits with
the marginal translations in Beinecke MS 508.
the presence in the margins of unique and fairly systematic transla-
tions into Latin further suggests that this is Worm’s manuscript. Worm
was a scholar with an imperfect command of old Icelandic yet a deep
interest in northern history. A man excited about the possibility of new
texts being found or rediscovered in Iceland, he is the person most likely
to have owned and worked with this manuscript, especially given that we
know that Arngrímur sent him a copy of the annals made in north Iceland,
probably with Latin translations in the margins. Arngrímur probably did
not pen these translations himself, but he did not need to have physically
written the translation to have sent the manuscript and been associated
with it, as he clearly was by several Danish scholars.
this identification cannot be entirely secure, of course, but if Beinecke
MS 508 is not the manuscript sent by Arngrímur to Worm, it is still an ad-
ditional seventeenth-century northern annals manuscript that needs to be
accounted for. this requires us to posit that still another copy of the north-
ern annals was made in Iceland and fitted with extensive marginal transla-
tions at a similar period and left no other trace. this is surely possible, but
there seems to me no particular reason for positing an additional phantom
early modern copy. If we assume that the annals sent by Arngrímur burned
in 1728, the number of copies of northern annals from the seventeenth
century produced at Hólar begins to multiply alarmingly. there was some-
thing of a boom in annals production at Hólar at this time,62 but it seems
needlessly complex to assume that still another, otherwise unmentioned,
copy of the annals was made in the mid-seventeenth century.
In addition to preserving a medieval annals text, Beinecke MS 508 pre-
serves traces of how early modern scholars helped each other to access new
sources, by sending, and sometimes translating, manuscripts. the balance
of give and take in the relationship between Worm and Arngrímur, the
well-connected doctor in Copenhagen and the curate with nine surviving
children to look after, can look unbalanced. jakob Benediktsson suggests
that Arngrímur often seemed more concerned with protecting his own
interests than with helping Worm.63 It is hard to measure the various
62 see Islandske Annaler, xxvi–xxvii, xxxii, li–lii.
63 He writes that “many of [Arngrímur’s] letters to Worm rather bear the stamp of his efforts