Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1957, Page 159

CHAPTER IV
139
13313> the description of his club and of his death is omitted com-
pletely, see 291, in2-16, H327-ii42, 1216-21. Finally, J omits the
replies which are put into the mouths of the eighth and tenth
Jomsviking in F, H; this omission was almost certainly due to
AJ, for the eighth’s reply contains an untranslatable pun and
the tenth’s is rather indecent.
Nothing warrants a closer discussion of these last features,
nos. 49—65; a glance at them is enough to convince us that they
can contribute nothing towards the solution of the problems dis-
cussed earlier. The same is true of certain variant readings in
numbers, on which nothing can be based because misreadings of
figures are so extremely common in manuscripts. We shall not
give a list of them here and reference may be made to the notes
on the passages ioi12-13, 10210, 10823, 11327, 11518, 11726, 11912,
I231-24, 1278, 1293, 13414, 13634.
In conclusion, a few words on the age of J. Gjessing (p. Vil)
believed that J reproduced Jvs. in an older form than 291. Later
critics have not favoured this point of view and the present dis-
cussion has not confirmed it. I believe that it is possible to
demonstrate the influence on J of at least two sources other than
the usual Jvs. redaction. We know too little of these sources to
be able to use them in assessing the date of J. Neither is there
anything in the text of J itself that gives an indication of its date
of origin (cf. however the note to I 10134). We know only that
the Icelandic text existed on vellum, of the manuscript’s age we
know nothing and it is quite uncertain whether this was the orig-
inal of the J redaction or a copy descended from it. That form
of the common redaction of Jvs. which was the basis of J must
at any rate have been old, at least not much younger than from
the middle of the thirteenth century, since it was a version par-
allel to the original of the 291-group. This is the only terminus
post quem we possess. A terminus ante quem is given only by
Huitfeldt’s possession of the vellum, but we do not know when
or whence he obtained it. Probably it came to him from Norway,
and in that case it can scarcely have been younger than from the