Gripla - 2020, Qupperneq 92

91
Two additional anatomical digressions are found in the saga. The first
of these states that:
Reiði hvers manns er í galli en líf í hjarta, minni í heila, metnaðr í
lungum, hlátr í milti, lystisemi í lifr.72
The anger of every man is found in the gall, and life in the heart,
memory in the brain, pride in the lungs, laughter in the spleen, lust
in the liver.
The second reads:
Ǫll bein hans skulfu, þau sem í váru hans líkama, en þat váru cc
beina ok xiiij bein. Tennr hans nǫtruðu, þær váru xxx. Allar æðar í
hans hǫrundi pipruðu fyrir hræðslu sakir, þær váru cccc ok xv.73
All his bones shook, the ones that were in his body, and that was
214 bones. His teeth rattled, they were 30. All the veins in his body
trembled with fear, they were 415.
No exact match to the first digression has been found, but related material
may be found in Pliny, Isidore and others.74 By contrast, the second digres-
sion exactly matches the thirteenth-century Salernian Flos Medicine, to the
point that the numbers can be shown to be misreadings of numbers given
in that text (CCCCXV for CCCLXV and CCXIV for CCXIX). The same
can be said, however, about the Old English Prose solomon and saturn, and
the 365 bones can also be found in Irish texts.75 This digression may have
been influenced by Flos Medicine, in which case it is unlikely to predate c.
1300 by very much, but it is equally possible that the numbers have entered
the Icelandic tradition through, for instance, Insular monastic influence.
These two digressions belong to the last five in the saga, and as noted
above, the texts of Haukr’s ‘first secretary’ and B suggest that these have
been added under the influence of earlier digressions. Four of them are
72 Fóstbrœðra saga, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson, 149.
73 Fóstbrœðra saga, ed. Björn K. Þórólfsson, 162.
74 Jónas Kristjánsson, Um ‘Fóstbræðrasögu’, 244.
75 See the ‘Prose solomon and saturn’ and ‘Adrian and Ritheus’, ed. by James. E. Cross and
Thomas D. Hill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 34, 123–26.
Fó STBRœÐ RA SAGA: A MISSING LINK?