Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 22

GRIPLA20
(1983:70–71). The script of the fragment bears striking resemblance to our
Hand B, and there seems every likelihood that he was indeed the scribe.11 The
recto side of this gradual leaf was originally left blank, but it was later used to
record the Höskuldssta›ir inventory of 1395, a fact which naturally suggests
that the gradual was once the property of the church there.
I have elsewhere concluded that Hand A worked in the north of Iceland,
(Jakob Benediktsson 1980:11–12) and the evidence for that finding need not
be repeated here. I may however add that AM 657 a–b 4to was a book that be-
longed to the church at Bólsta›arhlí› in Húnafling, and that, as we have just
seen, the gradual leaf in AM dipl isl fasc V 12 belonged to Höskuldssta›ir,
another church in the same district. It may further be noted that both the
Jónsbók manuscripts in which Hand A appears were in North Iceland around
1500. It is obvious that the scribes of 227 worked in a place where a group of
men were busy with book-production and had artists at hand. They supplied a
variety of patrons with a variety of books, secular and religious, service-books
among them. Gu›björg Kristjánsdóttir drew the natural conclusion that the
centre where these codexes were produced was one of the more prominent
clerical establishments, with the Benedictine house at fiingeyrar her first
choice: as noted above, two books in the group belonged to churches, and
those churches were both in Húnafling, the district in which the fiingeyrar
monastery was also situated.
To return to 227. It was seen above that the existence of the codex cannot
be confidently traced to a date before 1588 — in that year it was in Skálholt.
It is clear that it always survived in conditions that made for tolerably decent
conservation: the vellum of the leaves that were not separated from the codex
is still in comparatively good shape. The marginalia indicate that the volume
was in the hands of educated men throughout its career, and it can be
presumed that it belonged to a clerical establishment rather than to a series of
private owners. On these grounds it is understandable that some scholars have
decided that 227 must have been permanently in Skálholt (Seip 1956:8,16;
Jakobsen 1965:53), a conclusion we can ultimately neither prove nor dis-
prove. There is on the other hand nothing to show that the codex was made in
Skálholt, as some commentators have maintained (cf. Jakob Benediktsson
1980:11). Its origin in North Iceland seems to me manifest, whether it then
came to Skálholt bran-new, specifically made for the cathedral, or whether it
11 See Stefán Karlsson (ed.) 1963a:72; 1963b:117–118. Some individual features of letterforms
may be noted, „a“, round „s“, and especially „x“ and the et sign.