Gripla - 20.12.2018, Page 234

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2. Manuscripts and scribe
the sermon in question survives in the manuscript fragments aM 696
VIII 4to and aM 696 IX 4to, both now in reykjavík.11 The former is a
single leaf, rather worn and missing at least a line of text at the top of each
side; the latter is a bifolium, somewhat less worn, but with significant por-
tions of the vellum cut away, so that about a third of the text on fol. 1 and
more than two thirds of the text on fol. 2 are missing. Kålund, who cor-
rectly identified the text in aM 696 IX 4to as a sermon for Christmas, also
made the note “æmnet synes beslægtet med indholdet af 696 VIII,” and he
dated both fragments to the fifteenth century.12 In the first of these judg-
ments he was correct, since aM 696 VIII 4to and aM 696 IX 4to are, in
fact, two fragments from the same copy of the same text: aM 696 IX 4to
fol. 1r picks up where the verso of aM 696 VIII 4to leaves off, and aM
696 IX 4to fol. 2 contains material that (as the source identification below
proves) comes from an earlier part of the same sermon. text is missing
between aM 696 IX 4to fol. 2v and the recto of aM 696 VIII 4to, so that
the construction of the gathering from which the fragments were taken can
be partly imagined as follows, where solid lines represent surviving leaves
and dotted lines represent lost leaves:
at least one leaf, with which aM 696 VIII 4to would have formed a bifo-
lium, must be missing. Whether one or more other inner bifolia have been
lost immediately before the recto of aM 696 VIII 4to can only be guessed
at, since the amount of text missing from the sermon would depend on
how closely the Icelandic author followed his source.13
11 Digital images of aM 696 VIII 4to are available at http://handrit.is/en/manuscript/view/
is/aM04-0696-VIII, accessed 20 June 2018.
12 Kålund, Katalog, vol. 2, 112 (item 1741); see also Hall, “old norse-Icelandic Sermons,”
703–4 (items 32 and 33), where aM 696 VIII 4to is, for reasons unclear, described as a
“sermon on the Passion.”
13 the main Latin source sermon is quite long, and over 1000 words of it fall into the section
AM 696 IX 4to fol. 2
AM 696 VIII 4to
AM 696 IX 4to fol. 1