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reflecting Björn Jónsson’s interests and aims. It is noteworthy that certain
riddles are the object of extremely scant attention while others receive
extensive treatment. yet the length of the commentary for each individual
riddle might not directly correlate with interest or lack of interest: while a
short or almost non-existent explanation could reveal a lack of interest in
a dull riddle, it could alternatively be a respectful deferral to a conundrum
which had already been well posed and explained. the longer expositions
on riddles would seem to allow us to infer pleasurable intellectual engage-
ment, but they could also be necessitated by shoddy or over-obscure style.
Moreover, these explanations do not exist in a vacuum: by explaining the
esoteric wisdom behind the riddles, Björn Jónsson is not only distinguish-
ing himself from the confused common man, but also engaging, as men-
tioned, with learned circles, both Icelandic and foreign, either intentionally
or otherwise, and thus this piece of writing can be seen as an act of intel-
lectual self-fashioning.
manuscript Witnesses
the edition presented here makes use of seven manuscripts, in all of which
Björn’s commentary appears alongside a text of the Hervarar saga riddles.
As already mentioned, none of them appear to be Björn’s autograph. Love
discusses five of these, all from the seventeenth-century: AM 203 fol., AM
192 fol., AM 202 k fol. (the manuscript is in two parts, I and II, each of
which contains a text of the commentary, although that found in part I is
now only partially visible), AM 591 k 4to and AM 167 b III 8vo.16 Within
the Arnamagnæan collections and those at the National Library of Iceland
I have been unable to locate any further witnesses.17 A further copy (the
seventh) of the commentary is, however, present in nKS 1891 4to at the
16 Love, The Reception of Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, 234. Due to the two versions in AM 202
k fol. these five manuscripts can be said to contain six texts of the commentary.
17 Einar g. Pétursson, in his article “Akrabók: Handrit með hendi Árna Böðvarssonar á
Ökr um og hugleiðingar um handritarannsóknir á eddunum,” Gripla 18 (2007), states,
along side his discussion of the riddles from Hervarar saga, that ‘til eru skýringar á gátum
gestumblinda eftir Björn Jónsson á Skarðsáʼ [there are also explanations of the riddles
by Björn Jónsson á Skarðsá], 151. However he does not, and rightly so, state that they are
present in Akrabók (now with the shelfmark SÁM 72). I am grateful to him for his helpful
clarification on this point (private correspondence).
O E D I P U S I N D U S T R I U S A E N I G M A T U M I S L A N D I C O R U M
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