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as blind tooling and leaves being cut flush with the boards) are more com-
monly found in earlier bindings, for instance the so-called “romanesque”
bindings which are typically found on manuscripts from the eleventh to
the end of the fourteenth centuries.9 Since Kålund dates the main part of
aM 22 4to to the second half of the fifteenth century, however, and since
the binding does not show any traces of reuse, it can hardly be older than
that. thus, the earliest possible dating would be around 1450.
nothing in aM 22 4to suggests that the manuscript was unbound for
a long period of time after it was written. It is furthermore unlikely that
the binding was disturbed later on and the fragment placed underneath
the leather cover then. When the last four leaves were added to aM 22 4to
in the sixteenth century, they were merely glued into the existing binding
structure without disrupting it. Moreover, the leather cover does not ap-
pear to have been removed from the wooden boards at an earlier time, and
the glue on the spine and boards suggests that the fragment was an original
part of the binding. It can hence be concluded that the three strips of the
fragment were placed underneath the cover of the binding when the manu-
script was first bound, which presumably happened not too long after it
was written, i.e. between 1450 and 1500 or a few years after that.10
about the transcription
the text preserved on the fragment has been transcribed here on a fairly
diplomatic level. abbreviations have been expanded (and italicized) in
keeping with the scribe’s general practice. Certain letter forms are kept
apart, most notably ⟨i⟩ vs. ⟨í⟩, ⟨r⟩ vs. ⟨ꝛ⟩ and ⟨s⟩ vs. ⟨ſ⟩, whereas others have
been merged, e.g. ⟨ı⟩ and ⟨i⟩, ⟨m⟩ and ⟨⟩ and ⟨n⟩ and ⟨⟩.
Due to the relatively poor condition of the fragment in places, in many cas-
es it cannot be determined whether the scribe wrote ⟨ı⟩, ⟨i⟩ or ⟨í⟩. Similarly,
the distinction between ⟨d⟩ and ⟨ð⟩ is uncertain in several instances. In
some cases, the ⟨ð⟩ could furthermore be interpreted as a ⟨⟩ (a ligature of
⟨ꝺ⟩ and ⟨e⟩). these, and other paleographical and linguistic aspects – in-
9 Szirmai, Archaeology, 140–142.
10 this dating is highly dependent on Kålund’s paleographic dating of the main text of aM
22 4to, a critical re-evaluation of which would be desirable.
A RECENTLY-DISCOVERED FRAGMENT