Gripla - 2021, Qupperneq 13

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Museum to survey the Icelandic manuscripts kept there, and two years
later he published an article reporting on his most important findings.11
Although the Stowe manuscripts had been a part of the British Museum’s
manuscript collection for seven years by that time, Jón seems not to have
known about them. Jón’s article is not exhaustive – he only discusses the
manuscripts that he finds most interesting – but had he been aware of a
fourteenth-century Icelandic parchment fragment in the Stowe collection
he would undoubtedly have included a discussion of it.
In 1933, Jón Helgason, director of the Arnamagnæan Institute in Cop-
en hagen, began work on a descriptive catalogue of the Icelandic manu-
scripts in the British Museum.12 He lists manuscripts from the Additional,
Egerton, and Sloane collections, but, unfortunately, makes no mention of
the Icelandic manuscripts in the Stowe collection. The catalogue, which has
been an invaluable resource for scholars working on Old Norse-Icelandic
texts, has not been published, but a typescript of it is accessible at the
Arnamagnæan institutes in Copenhagen and Reykjavík.13
In later writings where the Icelandic texts found in the Stowe col-
lection are discussed (i.e. Stjórn, Partalopa saga, Elís saga ok Rósamundu,
and the legends in the parchment bifolium), no mention has been made
of the Stowe manuscripts. For example, the otherwise comprehensive
Bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic Romances, compiled by Marianne E.
Kalinke and P. M. Mitchell in 1985, mentions neither Stowe MS 979 nor
Stowe MS 980 in the entries on Elís saga ok Rósamundu and Partalopa saga,
and in their respective editions of Partalopa saga (1983) and Stjórn (2009),
neither Lise Præstgaard Andersen nor Reidar Astås include the Stowe
manuscripts in their discussions on secondary manuscripts.14
“Notice,” Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, ed.
J. A. Herbert (London: British Museum, 1910), 3:[iii].
11 Jón Þorkelsson, “Islandske håndskrifter i England og Skotland,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 8
(1892): 199–237.
12 Matthew J. Driscoll, “Plans for a New Edition of the fornaldarsögur, anno 1937,” Forn-
aldarsagaerne: Myter og virkelighed. Studier i de oldislandske fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, eds.
Agneta Ney, Ármann Jakobsson, and Annette Lassen (Copenhagen: Museum Tuscul anum
Press, 2009), 17–18.
13 Jón Helgason’s catalogue is currently being prepared for publication in Copenhagen as
Catalogue of the Icelandic manuscripts in the British Library. This updated version will include
the three Icelandic Stowe manuscripts.
14 Marianne E. Kalinke and P. M. Mitchell, Bibliography of Old Norse-Icelandic Romances,
ANECDOTES OF SEVERAL ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY