Gripla - 2021, Blaðsíða 10
GRIPLA8
de Blois,4 in Stowe MS 980. All three are eighteenth-century paper cop-
ies of extant parchment manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan collection in
Copenhagen. As such, their value as witnesses to the texts they hold is not
great, even though, as transcriptions go, these are quite good. But tucked
in at the back of Stowe MS 980 is a parchment bifolium of considerable
interest. It contains text written by an Icelandic scribe in the second half
of the fourteenth century and features short tales about archbishops of
Canterbury, such as the saints Augustine, Dunstan, and Anselm, as well
as a short life of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. Some of these texts are previ-
ously unknown translations of Latin texts, while others supplement texts
that have hitherto only been known to exist in a fragmentary state.
In 1787, Grímur Thorkelin (1752–1829), the secretary of the Arna-
magnæan Commission, gave Thomas Astle (1735–1803), the keeper of
records in the Tower of London – whose manuscripts make up the bulk of
the Stowe collection – the two romance manuscripts along with the parch-
ment bifolium. The romances appear to be in Thorkelin’s own hand and
were possibly copied for the purpose of presenting them as gifts during his
journey through Britain, upon which he embarked in 1786. But how the
fourteenth-century bifolium came to be in Thorkelin’s possession needs
further examination. Several pieces of evidence show that the bifolium
had earlier been a part of a manuscript in the Arnamagnæan collection in
Copenhagen, which now bears the shelfmark AM 764 4to: the bifolium
is codicologically, palaeographically, and orthographically consistent with
parts of AM 764 4to; its text fits seamlessly into AM 764 4to; and last
but not least, its contents match an item listed as being in AM 764 4to in
handwritten catalogues of the Arnamagnæan collection, written in the first
half of the eighteenth century, but that item is presently not to be found
in the manuscript.
Thematically, the texts on the bifolium are also consistent with other
texts in AM 764 4to. According to Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, the first half
of the manuscript (ff. 1–23) in the Arnamagnæan collection follows a
“universal history” or aetatis mundi model, where material from disparate
sources that were already available to the scribes in Old Norse-Icelandic
4 Lise Præstgaard Andersen, “Partalopa saga,” Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclopedia, 497–
98.