Gripla - 20.12.2014, Page 83

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contributions each made to the other, and past a certain point useless to
attempt, but in addition to Arngrímur’s steady appeals for help for his chil-
dren, friends, and legal interests, he contributed labor to the development
of historical scholarship in the seventeenth century in Denmark, labor to
which this manuscript attests.
It remains unclear how this annals manuscript survived, but I have a
tentative suggestion. It seems possible that the manuscript was sent to
or appropriated by an antiquarian working in England sometime before
1728. this is supported by the fact that the annals were eventually bound
with the excerpts from the Archaionomia, excerpts that do not seem to
be chosen at random but rather focus on content about the Danelaw and
hence on Scandinavian influences. this might leave us to wonder when
precisely the manuscript became separated from resen’s collection, where
it presumably still was when Sperling made his extracts sometime before
1715 (when it also seems to have been bound differently, perhaps at the end
of another book). We can only speculate about these details, but when the
library burned, the annals sent by Arngrímur were not there. Beinecke MS
508, a lonely survivor out of a shipwrecked library, preserves neither the
oldest nor the most beautiful of the Icelandic annals, but it sheds light on
the movement of texts, the frustrations of medieval vernaculars, and the
nature of scholarly sharing in early modern europe.
BIBLIOGRAPHy
M A n u S C r I P t S
Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum, Reykjavík
AM 410 4to AM 1058 V 4to
AM 412 4to
AM 429 a 1 4to gKS 3638 8vo
AM 429 a 2 4to
to protect his own interests than of the desire to further Worm’s studies,” cf. Ole Worm’s
Correspondence, xiv.
BEInECKE MAnuSCrIPt 508