Gripla - 20.12.2014, Síða 259

259
ANtHONy FAULkes
A nEWLY DISCoVErED MAnuSCrIPt
of MAgnúS ÓLAfSSon’S EDDA
PrIVAtE CoLLECtIon, LonDon
1. Magnús Ólafsson’s Edda
this 8vo manuscript, purchased in Denmark a few years ago, was
probably written in Iceland in the late 18th or early nineteenth century.
It is written on paper, apparently by a single hand (with the minor excep-
tions noted below), in black ink, with some coloured (red and green or
blue) decoration to the lettering of the title page. the binding is certainly
more modern; it has marbled boards and a cloth spine without any letter-
ing. the binder has cut the bottom of the leaves very close, in a few cases
taking off part of the last line of writing (e.g. on page 142). the spine has
become very dry and brittle and the volume has suffered from much use.
the name written on the front flyleaf in a different and probably much
later hand than the text is difficult to decipher, but may read ‘Þórarinsson’.
this un-Icelandic use of the patronymic alone, without the owner’s first
name, suggests that this Þórarinsson, who is of course unidentifiable, had
emigrated from Iceland to Denmark, perhaps in the second half of the 19th
century, and had there used his patronymic as a surname in the Danish
fashion. If so, this emigrant presumably brought the manuscript from
Iceland to his new home with him.
the title on the title page reads ‘edda . . . med vidbætir’, and this cor-
responds well with the contents of the volume, which is an interpolated
and re-arranged version of Magnús Ólafsson’s Edda with an appendix con-
taining material about Icelandic runes. Magnús Ólafsson’s Edda was itself
a re-arrangement of Snorra-Edda (the Prose or Younger Edda), a treatise on
poetry compiled in the first half of the 13th century by the Icelandic histo-
rian and poet snorri sturluson. Snorra-Edda contained a Prologue about the
origin of Norse religion, Gylfaginning (mythological narratives from the
Creation down to ragnarökkr, ‘the twilight of the gods’), Skáldskaparmál
Gripla XXV (2014): 259–267