Gripla - 20.12.2004, Qupperneq 10

GRIPLA8
scathed, it remains one of the finest achievements of fourteenth-century Ice-
landic book-production.
227 is in large folio, with leaves which now measure 35x27 cm but which
were once bigger still. The margins have been trimmed, evidently when it was
bound late in the seventeenth century, as we can see from damage suffered by
the ornament at the edge of some leaves (fols. 1v, 2v, 23v, 38v, 88v) and
similar damage suffered by marginalia (on e.g. 13v and 61v). There is also the
evidence of fol 129, a leaf which was cut out of the codex before it was bound
(cf. below p. 9). It is 37 cm tall and has outer margins of 5–6 cm compared to
the 4–5 cm of those in the bound volume.
The script is large and painstakingly written. Pages are written in two
columns, each of 44 lines; chapter-titles are in red, and colours in rich variety
appear in the illuminated initials, eight of which are resplendent historiated
capitals (fols. 1v, 23v, 33v, 38r, 71v, 83v, 88v, 115r). The art of 227 has been
discussed by several scholars, but it has been treated in most detail by Dr
Selma Jónsdóttir in her book, L‡singar í Stjórnarhandriti, published in Reykja-
vík in 1971 (and simultaneously in English, Illumination in a Manuscript of
Stjórn). She there finds clear evidence of influence on the Stjórn artist from a
group of English psalters of the first decades of the fourteenth century.
Lines across the page and column verticals were scored with a stylus;
generous margins were left. The vellum, virtually unblemished, was prepared
with care. It is obvious that no expense was spared in producing the volume.
We now have 128 leaves. Five of them came into Árni Magnússon’s hands
after he had obtained the codex itself. Three of them are only fragments (fols.
80–83; 81–82 are remnants of the same leaf, but they were foliated separately
in the nineteenth century, which is why we now have a fol 129). The other
two, fols. 68 and 129, are complete.
227 was made up of eight-leaf gatherings (though doubt must remain as to
the size of the last, cf. below p. 9). Their state of preservation is as follows:
Gathering 1 (fols. 1–7). Folio 7, now a singleton, was originally twinn-
ed with another, presumably blank, which did duty as a flyleaf before
the present fol 1. This flyleaf has been cut out, but a narrow strip of it
remains visible at the spine.
Gathering 2 (fols. 8–11). The outermost and innermost bifolia remain
(fols. 8 + 11, 9 + 10); four leaves are lost, two after fol 8 and two after
fol 10 (Unger 1862:32–39, 47–54).