Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1943, Blaðsíða 86

52
ubivis obvia de prisco septentrionis dogmate ac ritu collata cum
Græcis Romanis eram editurus” (Safn FræSafélagsins XII 152).
The work seems to have got no further than the plans, and there is
nothing to show that any part of it was ever written. On the other
hånd, the following passages (345-8) show that Brynjolfur treated
some questions relating to this subject in the lost part of his Conjec-
tanea to Saxo.
— 34™. See Konungs skuggsjå (1920) pp. 40-45. Hekla is cer-
tainly not mentioned by name in Konungs skuggsjå but the belief
in hell was from the old days especially connected with that volcano.
— 34z0'27- This piece corresponds to § 12a in RS, and this is
the only part where the arrangement is not quite identical in the
two treatises. Possibly it may be due to transpositions in the original
succession of the questions (cf. Introduction, p. XII).
— 342i. Aristoteles in Meteoricis; probably Aristotle, Meteoro-
logica I 12.
§ 12. Both bishops are agreed in rejecting the exaggerated ac-
counts of the profits derived from the mining of sulphur. As a ground
for it HR gives the superstition that the fisheries decline in the same
proportion as weight is attached to the mining of sulphur or other
mining. As far as I know, this idea is not mentioned elsewhere, but
perhaps something similar underlies a statement from the 19th cen-
tury that waste water from the mining of sulphur causes a dearth
of fish where it flows into the sea (Bjarni Thorarensen in a letter in
Safn FræSafélagsins XIII, 1943, p. 257). In the i6th century there
was actually a good deal of profit to be made on the mining of
sulphur in Iceland; only, this profit landed in other pockets than
those of the Icelanders, viz. in the merchants’ and later in the king’s,
when the mining of sulphur was made a royal prerogative. In the
17th century the price of sulphur had, however, fallen considerably,
and the mining had at that time almost ceased. In the very same
year that the two treatises were written the district judge Gisli Mag-
nusson and his father were given the monopoly of the mining of
sulphur for the whole of Iceland (see Safn FræSafélagsins XI 26-
33) ; but they had not started work yet, so the statements of the two
treatises are correct.
P. 3433. Mandrabuli more cessisse: derived from the Greek ex-