Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Side 49

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by Unger. It is the only MS which has branch II between branches I and
III, as in Unger’s edition.
Årni Magnusson originally possessed five vellum manuscripts of Kms11.
Two of these are still preserved, viz. Unger’s A and a. Of the three that
were apparently lost in the fire of 1728, one was the non admodum vetus-
tus codex of which B is a copy. The second is called “a small folio MS,
an old vellum, bound in broken wooden plates (gamall codex i brotnum
spiålldum). Of all the other MSS of Kms Årni says that they were incom-
plete, but there is no such note under this item. The third MS was “a
quarto MS, sown in leather, not old, very deficient” (inn saumud i ledur,
ecke gdmul, vantar miked i). No copies of these two MSS have survived.
These vellums had all belonged to the Cathedral of Skålholt, and for
some reason, they were among the relatively few old vellums lost in the
fire. Several MSS of the saga are mentioned in mediæval inventories of
various Icelandic monasteries12, and some of them may be indentical with
those found at Skålholt after the Reformation.
Three of the five fragments are in the Norwegian Public Records
Office (Riksarkivet).
Fri is Norwegian, from the second half of the 13th century13. It con-
sists of parts of two leaves, the upper half of one leaf and the lower half
of the following one, and probably they were the middle leaves of a
gathering. Fri contains parts of the translation of the Chanson de Roland,
branch VIII of the saga. The dialect is “Inner Southwest Norwegian”,
but there are two definitely Icelandic forms: hneig (ed. p. 55622) and
hlogu (p. 55727). This means either that the MS was written by an Ice-
lander who transcribed a Norwegian MS, or that it was written by a
Norwegian who copied an Icelandic original. We know that Icelandic
scribes were active in Norway in the 13th century; for example, Pidreks
saga is preserved in a Norwegian MS written by 5 hånds, two of which
are Icelandic. It is not unlikely that Fri was also written by an Icelander.
Fr2, from the beginning of the 14th century, consists of parts of 12
11 All listed in Arne Magnussons ... håndskriftfortegnelser, p. 44. Unger, p.
xxxvn, says there were six vellum MSS of the saga in Arni’s collection before the
fire, but this is because the item dealing with MS A is repeated, by mistake.
n Halldor Hermannsson: Icelandic Manuscripts (Islandica 19, Ithaca 1929), pp.
32-34.
13 Unger p. xl; D. A. Seip: Norsk språkhistorie til omkring 1370, 2nd. ed., Oslo
1955, p. 92.: “omkr. 1270-80”.
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