Skáldskaparmál - 01.01.1997, Page 230

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Matthew James Dríscoll
improved. These are, in other words, texts which if properly interrogated could
reveal a great deal concerning attitudes toward gender and sexuality in the cultures
in which they were produced and received. The present article makes no attempt
to do so, however, but will instead confine itself to an examination of some aspects
of Skikkjurímurs transmission.3 This is not done in the interest merely of
establishing a text, but rather to see if an examination of the extant witnesses
cannot tell us something about the nature of the rímur text itself - and, by
extension, something about the nature of pre-modern textuality generally.
Skikkjurímur are preserved in three manuscripts,4 a number not vast, but
demonstrably greater than one. The earliest of the three is Codex 42.7 4to in Die
herzogliche Bibliothek at Wolfenbiittel, Germany, an Icelandic vellum from the
second half, probably the middle of the second half, of the fifteenth century,
containing in its original state some twenty rímur cycles but now only sixteen.5
This text ofthe rímur, which I shall refer to as W, was used by GustafCederschiöld
as the basis for his edition in Versions nordiques du fabliau frangais ‘Le mantel
mautaillié’, published in Lund in 1877. Cederschiöld knew only one other
manuscript, a late seventeenth-century paper manuscript in the Royal Library in
Stockholm, about which I shall have more to say presently.
Another text of Skikkjurímur came to light in 1902, when Björn Líndal, a
young Icelandic law student at the end of his first winter at the University in
Copenhagen, approached the Arnamagnæan Commission with a manuscript
containing sixteen rímur cycles. Professor Finnur Jónsson was able to persuade
the Commission to buy the manuscript (for 75 kroner — a months wages for a
manual worker in 1902). Both parties seem to have benefitted from the transact-
ion: Björn completed his studies and went on to become a prominent soliciter
and eventually Member of Parliament,6 while the manuscript became MSAccess-
3 Although perhaps falling short of a full-scale interrogation, an earlier study of mine did attempt
to rough the text of Skikkjurímur up slightly. This was published first in Icelandic, ‘Skikkja
skírlífisins: breytingar í gengd sögu’, Ný saga, III (1989), pp. 65-74, and subsequently in a
revised English version, ‘The Cloak of Fidelity: Skikkjurímur, a late-medieval Icelandic version
of Le Mantel mautaillié', The Arthurian Yearbook, I, ed. Keith Busby (New York, 1991), pp.
107-133. The present article may be said to have grown out of a suggestion I made there in a
footnote that a more detailed study of the extant manuscripts would be a worthwhile undertak-
ing.
4 The sixteenth-century vellum AM 603 4to is known to have originally contained a text of
Skikkjurímurofwhich nothing now remains; see Kr. Kalund, KatalogoverDenAmamagnœanske
Hándskrifisamling(Copenhagen, 1888-1894), II, pp. 3-5, and Björn Karel Þórólfsson, Rímur
fyrir 1600, pp. 4—6.
5 For a full description of the manuscript see the introduction to Ólafur Halldórsson’s facsimile
edition, Kollsbók: Codex Guelferbytanus 42.7. Augusteus Quarto, íslenzk handrit, Series in 4to,
V (Reykjavík, 1968). A description was also published in Antiquarisk Tidskrift (1849-51), pp.
7-13, written byjón Sigurðsson.
6 See íslenzkar æviskrár frá landnámstímum til ársloka 1940, ed. Páll Eggert Ólason (Reykjavík,
1948-76), I, p. 234.