Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Side 87
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The second case is:
.. hvi fari J>it svå fåliSa ? Vdru (sic Bb, eru Fr4) hestarnir eigi til reiSu ? (Kms
p. 2312).
In the latter case, vdru is definitely a better reading, and if the MS from
which b was copied had eru, a sensible scribe would probably correct it
as a matter of course. In the first case, there is only a small syntactical
difference between the two expressions104, and I am inclined to think
that the change was made by Sira Ketill Jorundsson, the scribe who wrote
b. If the corrections made b agree with B against Fr4, it is because there
were in both cases only two alternatives, and if Sira Ketill rejected the
Fr4 reading, he had to choose an expression which also happened to be
that of B.
In my opinion Fr4 is a fragment of the very MS copied by Sira Ketill
Jorundsson105.
Fri contains a part of the Runzivals pdttr, and it will therefore be dis-
cussed later. It is older than all the other MSS and fragments, and has a
better text than any of them.
The difference between the Aa text and the Bb text is always more
important than that between A and a, or B and b. There are corruptions,
omissions and additions in both versions, and although the Aa version
generally has the better text, there are many cases where Bb has preserved
better readings. 5 has shortened the original text, and made some changes,
but it is independent of the Icelandic MSS, and has occasionally preserved
details which have been lost in the Icelandic versions, e.g. 5 has the cor-
rect translation of v. 48 of the Pelerinage:
Et si tient tote Perse tres que en Capadoce,
S: — han agher persiam alt til capadociam (ed. p. 25015),
A: — ok alt til bess lands er heitir Capadocia (Kms p. 46710”11),
Bb: — ok yfir ollum rikjum Jieim er bar liggja til (Kms p. 467, note 9).
But this is again a place where there is a lacuna in the best MS, a.
104 Cp. M. Nygaard: Norrøn Syntax, § 176, note.
M° Jakob Benediktsson, loc. cit. p. 213, has pointed out a corruption common to B,
b, and Fr4, in the clause “Nu fær Agulando hofuSit meS be*m orSum, at eigi um
aldr berr hann kåronu i heilagri Roma” (Kms pp. 22937-2301), which he thinks
ought to be “Nu fær hann Agulando hofuSit” etc. But this is not correct; Charle-
magne does not hånd Jamund’s head to Agulandus (who is not even present), but
says to his messenger: “Now tabe this head to Agulandus, with the following words:
He will never, etc.” (feer, imp. of færa, not fær, pres. of fa). There is no corruption
in the text here.