Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 71

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that corresponds to the one in the Liber floridus (Simek 1991, 113–114),
and AM 736 I 4to contains a plan of Jerusalem that is also found in the
Liber floridus (Simek 1992, 123).10 He also demonstrated the extraordi-
nary degree of similarity between the Liber floridus and Hauksbók: both
compilations contain a plan of Jerusalem, prophecies made by women,
a lapidary, histories of Troy and Britain, histories of the compiler’s own
locale, Elucidarius, De duodecim abusivis sæculi, and texts about astronomy,
rivers, paradise, regions of the world, false gods, the division of the world
among the sons of Noah, strange races, false prophets, the four fasts, the
rainbow, pilgrimage sites, and the four elements (Simek 1991, 1992). To
this list can be added the compilers’ own genealogies, extracts from canon
law, accounts of vikings, lists of bishops, and texts about arithmetic, chro-
nology, divination, the Antichrist, and sunrise and sunset. That the process
of reproducing the Liber floridus in Hauksbók appears to have occurred in
more than one stage does not detract from the force of Simek’s argument,
a point that will be returned to below. Simek noted that Hauksbók seems
to have been not an exact Icelandic translation of the Liber floridus but a
fairly close Icelandic version of it. In the case of arithmetic, cosmology,
geography, natural history, theology, and eschatology, there is little dif-
ference between Iceland and the rest of Christendom, so in these subjects
Haukr keeps close to his putative model. When it comes to astronomy,
however, Haukr includes items written by the Icelander Stjörnu-Oddi,
as Clunies Ross and Simek (1993, 165) pointed out. And where “local
history” is involved, Haukr amasses a considerable number of items about
the Icelandic, Greenlandic, and Scandinavian past: Landnámabók, Kristni
saga, Eiríks saga rauða, Hemings þáttr, Heiðreks saga, Fóstbræðra saga, Skálda
saga, Ragnarssona þáttr, Þáttr af Upplendinga konungum, lists of the bishops
of Greenland and Oslo, and the genealogies of himself and his wife.
If Haukr was using the Liber floridus as a model, his practice of fol-
lowing its outlines but not every detail of its content would have been
perfectly in keeping with the nature of medieval encyclopedias, which in
one widespread contemporary metaphor were considered mirrors of God’s
creation. From this point of view, it would be strange indeed if Haukr saw
in his mirror exactly the same things that Lambert saw in his. A more tech-
10 This map is also found in Hauksbók, but that copy is dated to after 1334, whereas AM 736
I 4to is from the beginning of the fourteenth century.
PERSPECTIVES ON HAUKSBÓ K