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Cardinal William of Sabina’s ruling about holidays. In the seventeenth
century, two quires with more texts were added before the main part.
This manuscript was copied in the second half of the fourteenth cen tury,
but at some point close to 1500, a list of Hólar’s bishops was entered onto
an unwritten space on f. 87r. The list was updated in more recent hands to
include each subsequent bishop including Bishop Gísli Magnússon, who
sat 1755–79. Some of the bishops may themselves have written their name
in the book.7 The presence of such a list suggests that the book belonged to
the episcopal see in Hólar, although this is far from conclusive evidence. The
Royal Library of Denmark bought the book at an auction in Copenhagen in
1786. It contains three ownership notes from the early modern period, but
the owners have not been more exactly identified.8
Belgsdalsbók, AM 347 fol.
I would like to suggest that the law book that the Sigurðarregistur charac-
terized as “vond,” damaged, might be Belgsdalsbók. This volume is indeed
damaged; it has lost its first quire and what is now the outer pages are
severely dirtied and abrased, suggesting that it spent a long time without a
binding at some point before Árni Magnússon acquired it.9 If this was its
state in 1525, it would rightly have been described as damaged.
Three reasons suggest that Belgsdalsbók might have belonged to the
bishop of Hólar. First, its earliest known owner was the daughter-in-law
of Bishop Jón Arason of Hólar. Second, its date and circumstances of
production point to Bishop Jón Eiríksson skalli of Hólar (bishop 1357–91)
as a possible commissioner. Third, Belgsdalsbók contains a collection of
unusual and unique texts that would obviously have been of interest to an
ecclesiastical owner.
7 I have not pursued this idea, which was inspired by lists of parsons found in the records of
Swedish parishes, in which clearly most new parsons have themselves written their names
in the old book. See, e.g., Grangärde kyrkoarkiv C:1, f. 10r–v, Uppsala landsarkiv, acces-
sible through https://sok.riksarkivet.se/digitala-forskarsalen.
8 Kristian Kålund, Katalog over de oldnorsk-islandske håndskrifter i Det store kongelige bibliotek
og i Universitetsbiblioteket (udenfor den arnamagnœanske samling) samt den Arnamagnœanske
samlings tilvœkst 1894–1899 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1900), 70–71; https://handrit.is/
en/manuscript/view/is/GKS04-3269a.
9 https://handrit.is/en/manuscript/imaging/is/AM02-0347.
HÓ LAR AND BELGSDALSBÓ K