Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1960, Síða 205

195
204 taken into the text following the annal. There is one textual
point worth noticing liere:
The Annales Eegii and the Oddaverja Annall for 1189 read: ok
bundit sini.
AM 439 reads: ok bundit sini (sinum edr seymi).
AM 204 reads: ok bundit sinum edr seymi.13
This shows that in 204 Bjorn’s parenthetical explanation of sini
has been adopted into the text instead of the original reading. This,
together with the faet that the marginal note in 439 appears in
the text in 204, seems to suggest that if the latter is the work of
Bjorn he must have compiled it af ter he had produced 439, and
must have had the latter before him when working on 204. How-
ever, there is some difficulty about this, because, as has already
been shown, 204 is not related to Sk; moreover, apart from this
one point, there is — at any rate in Prestssaga — no close textual
connection between 204 and 439. It therefore seems possible to
argue that if Bjorn was in faet the author of the 204-text,14 this
may have been his first work in the Sturlunga field, undertaken
before he commenced work on Sk. If so, the actual scribe of 204,
and not Bjorn himself, is probably responsible for replacing sini
by sinum edr seymi and taking the marginal note into the text.
The nature of the 204 text seems rather to confirm this. It is basi-
cally a II-class MS, but it frequently diverges from the II-text,
sometimes following I or the R text of Gudmundar saga biskups, but
most often having a reading peculiar to itself. This is sometimes
because the scribe misunderstood his original, but at other times
he has deliberately paraphrased it.
If Bjorn did write the text preserved in 204 before Sk, the
question is, what original did he use ? It is possible that he used II
itself, but, as has already been noticed, the text of 204 appears to
be to some extent a conflation of II and I, which is contrary to
what we know of Bjorn’s usual praetice; it therefore seems likely
that the conflation had already taken place in the original he used.
13 The version of this annal in the Flateyjarbåk Annals is ok bundit seymi.
14 The possibility must be borne in mind that the author of the 204-text was
not Bjorn but merely someone who at some time had access to 439 and took note
of the kastanrasti passage.