Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1960, Blaðsíða 58

50
One of the manuscripts of Grettis saga is AM 556 a, 4to, a fif-
teenth-century vellum. In it, the saga ends at line 10 of page 52
recto. At the end of the saga in this manuscript was written
Grettisfærsla, with this introduction: ‘lykw her sogv grettis as-
mundar sonar, aa fræde \>ui er Grettis færsla1 heiter. ok isfirdingar
gidrdu. J>aa er \>eir haufdu hånd tekith Gretti asmundar son. enn
marger hafa sidan vid auki£ maurgnw katlignm ordnrø. er Jaetta upp
haf å.’ Immediately after this the poem was written on three pages:
52 recto, 52 verso and 53 recto. It occupied 27 lines on 52 recto, 37
on 52 verso, and 35 on 53 recto, so that the poem took up 99 lines
altogether. Each line of the manuscript having about four lines of
verse, the whole poem was close on 400 lines. Grettisfærsla is no-
where else preserved. It is indeed scarcely preserved even here, for
the writing has been earefully scraped away. It was suspected that
the reason for this was that the poem was thought improper or
ohscene, and this suspicion has now been confirmed. So earefully
is the poem erased that by ordinary light, apart from a very few
words at the beginning, it is possible to make out only an odd
letter here and there. Names of people and other words have since
been written on these pages, inereasing still further the difficulty of
reading the original text; but worst of all some kind of liquid,
probably tineture of gall (cf. AntiquarisJc Tidsskrift, 1846-8, p. 116),
has been applied to 52 recto. This was probably done in the summer
of 18602 in the hope that the poem might be read by this means, but
the result is that the whole of that part of the poem which was
written on this page is completely illegible.
The oldest name written in the space where the erasure has been
made is that of Torleifur Magnusson. On 53 recto is written:
‘Thorleijfur Magnus son aa Ipessa Saugubok og af honum lijed’, and
further down and slightly to the left is the letter ‘M’ in the same
hånd, foliowed by a ligature in runes, probably ‘th’. At the bottom
of the same page is written (perpendicularly to the text): ‘Heidur
sie Gudi himnumrø A og hæsta lof iyrir’, and above this in the same
hånd: ‘Heidw’. This is the beginning of a hymn translated from the
German which was printed in Bishop Gu&brandur Borlåksson’s
1 Cd. færæsla (!).
2 Cf. Gr fårum Jons Arnasonar, ed. Finnur Sigmundsson, I, 1950, p. 224.