Gripla - 2021, Page 9

7
Gripla XXXII (2021): 7–56
BJARNI GUNNAR ÁSGEIRSSON
ANECDOTES OF SEVERAL ARCHBISHOPS
OF CANTERBURY
A Lost Bifolium From Reynistaðarbók
Discovered in the British Library
1. Introduction
the British liBrary houses a number of manuscripts of Icelandic
origin. Most were acquired by the British Museum in the late eighteenth
or early nineteenth century and were either a gift from Sir Joseph Banks
(1743–1820) or bought from Finnur Magnússon (1781–1847), the keeper
of the Royal Privy Archives in Copenhagen.1 Other Icelandic manuscripts
have trickled in at various times and from various places. When the British
Museum purchased the manuscripts and charters in the Stowe collection
in 1883 from the Earl of Ashburnham, whose father had bought the manu-
scripts from the library of Stowe House in 1849,2 it gained three more
manuscripts written in Icelandic or Old Norse: Stowe MS 6, Stowe MS
979, and Stowe MS 980. These manuscripts are not to be found in any of
the catalogues of Icelandic manuscripts in Britain that have been compiled
and have hitherto escaped the notice of scholars working with Old Norse-
Icelandic literature.
The texts of the manuscripts are the medieval Bible translation Stjórn
in Stowe MS 6 and two romances: Elís saga ok Rósamundu, a medieval
translation of (a presumably lost version of) the Old French chanson de geste
Élie de Saint-Gilles,3 in Stowe MS 979 and Partalopa saga, a medieval trans-
lation that ultimately derives from the Old French romance Partonopeus
1 Jón Helgason, “Íslenzk handrit í British Museum,” Ritgerðakorn og ræðustúfar (Reykjavík:
Félag íslenzkra stúdenta í Kaupmannahöfn, 1959), 110–13.
2 Edward J. L. Scott, ed., Catalogue of the Stowe Manuscripts in the British Museum (London:
British Museum, 1895), 1:iv–v.
3 Geraldine Barnes, “Elis saga ok Rosamundu,” Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, eds.
Phillip Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf (New York: Routledge, 2016), 162.