Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 25

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON STJÓRN 23
cades, with the added complication that it is in any case virtually impossible to
date a manuscript on palaeographic and orthographic grounds to within a
period of much less than half a century. Hand A shows some characteristics
which indicate that he established his scribal habits before the middle of the
fourteenth century, cf. e.g. his use of the older „a“ form and „ ∂“ and „ƒ“, his
regular use of „›“ in preterite verb forms as well as elsewhere, and the fact
that his spelling shows no sign of the svarabhakti. But from time to time he
has forms which are associated rather with the latter part of the fourteenth
century: „é“ expressed as „ie“ middle voice endings in -zt, -szt, and -st, and a
spelling such as „flersi“ for „flessi“. Other usages are of Norwegian origin:
„fv“ for intervocalic „f“ „gh“ for „g“ analogical „v-“ in „vor›it“, and so on. He
makes widespread use of the third person singular ending in the first person
singular indicative of verbs, both in 227 and in other manuscripts written by
him (Jakobsen 1965:76–77). There is some minor variation in the occurrence
of a number of these features in Hand A’s other work, and their differentiation
might conceivably help towards putting his manuscripts into some kind of
chronological order. That would require a far more extensive and detailed
study than is possible within the scope of the present article. One point to note
however is that there seem to be good grounds for thinking that Codex
Wormianus was written before 227. It has been shown that the Fourth
Grammatical Treatise in Codex Wormianus was most probably composed in
the period 1332–40 (Björn M. Ólsen 1884:xlii–xliv, 250–252), or at least very
soon afterwards, and it is clearly not the original that is contained in the codex.
This means that Codex Wormianus can hardly have been written before some
time in the 1340s. It appears highly probable that it was after that that the
scribe worked on 227 and in that case the time-limits for its making are
somewhat reduced, since it seems out of the question that it could have been
written later than in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. In present
circumstances it seems we can do no better than concur in the current general
opinion which assigns it to about 1350 or a little later.