Gripla - 01.01.1995, Side 149

STEFANUS SAGA IN REYKJAHÓLABÓK
147
kirkia must have generated kening, but the reasoning that identified
Sion as the Church’s teaching and then metaphorically as a cart is
impenetrable. Recourse to AM 655 XIV does not elucidate the prob-
lem. Although the fragment contains the Inventio narrative, this
dream is not transmitted.21
The above are examples of the types of misreadings and corruption
which attest that the legend of St. Stephen in Sth. 3 - with the excep-
tion of one chapter (see below) - is a copy of an already existing re-
daction. Although I would not go so far as to call it a „slavisk afskrift“
- what Widding and Bekker-Nielsen maintained the saga is not - the
text shares so many readings with other manuscripts and has scribal
errors of a kind incurred only in the process of copying, that one can
indeed argue that the Sth. 3 redaction is a fairly dependable copy,
without substantial intervention (in text shared by all the rnanu-
scripts), of an existing Icelandic redaction. The text of this redaction
deviated, however, in a number of remarkable aspects from the texts
transmitted in the other manuscripts.
The Icelandic source of Stefanus saga in Sth. 3, while corresponding
for the most part with readings in the other extant manuscripts in the
sense that the texts can be read side by side, nonetheless deviates at
times quite drastically or contains a fuller text. Widding and Bekker-
Nielsen interpreted this as scribal embellishment and amplification,
but it can be shown that additional or deviating text is not to be attrib-
uted to creative writing on Björn's part but to his source. The most
striking example of this occurs in the roses-and-saffron dream in the
Inventio (discussed in III below), but other such instances of what ap-
pears to be scribal augmentation actually transmit text already found
in the source, thus suggesting that this source had occasionally trans-
mitted a fuller text than the one in Sth. 2 and AM 661, manuscripts
21 In „Et Fragment af Stephanus Saga“ Ole Widding discusses this dream and re-
marks on the discrepancies between the Sth. 15 and Sth. 2 redactions. He posits two dif-
ferent translations to explain the divergences, because he believes that Sth. 2 is a copy
of the redaction in Sth. 15 („Afskriveren af Holm 2 folio-Redaktionen har kasseret den
Oversættelse, han fandt i Holm 15,4“-Redaktionen, og har givet en mere ordret Over-
sættelse“ [p. 154]. This explanation is implausible. Despite the greater age of the Sth. 15
redaction, it is evident that it is a revised and reduced version of the translation, which is
more faithfully transmitted in the younger manuscript Sth. 2, as the discussion of the
roses-and-saffron dream in section III makes evident.