Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.10.1960, Blaðsíða 201

189
There are c. 40 paper mss which reproduce the text of the saga or
treat it in some way. 27 of these belong together in a group, which the
author has called the ABC-group. This is divided into three subsidiary
groups: A, B and C. The groups A and B go back ultimately to a lost
common original *X, which is presumed to have been a copy of 556.
None of the prototypes of the groups A, B and C are preserved. How
*C came into existence is a little obscure. The author shows on pp. 16-
32 that the groups A and C on the one side, and B and C on the other
side, have a large number of innovations in common compared with 556,
and that moreover C has a number of readings which seem to have
arisen through conflation of the readings in A and B. For this and
several other reasons the author thinks that *C was a conflated ms,
and he points out on pp. 166f. that this type of text can have originated
in either of two ways: 1) The writer of *C had both *A and *B as ori-
ginals and chose pieces of text alternately from them; 2) He had a B-ms,
which was thickly interpolated with variants from an A-ms (the reverse
relationship is less likely, because the agreement is greater with the B-
group). The writer of *C changed between the A-text and the B-text
very frequently, in almost every sentence or clause. This circumstance
seems to support the assumption that he had an interpolated B-ms as
his original. Why the writer of *C conflated texts of these two types
into one is difficult to say, as the difference between the text in the
A-mss and that in the B-mss is quite unimportant and concerns only
the wording, not the subject-matter. Some sort of philological interest
must lie behind the origin of *C.
Following this, on pp. 32-94, the author deals with the changes
which took place within the groups A, B and C, their subsidiary groups
and individual mss. The result of this detailed examination can be seen
in the stemmas on pp. 185-187.
Of the paper mss which do not belong to the ABC-group, only three
(61, 324 and 1193) contain the whole text of Har8. They are all copied
from 556 (pp. 95-98 and 112-118); on 1193 see also below. Stockholm
ms 97 contains a Swedish translation of parts of Har5., made from 59
(pp. 104ff.). 60 and 194 contain verses from the saga, copied from 499
and *A respectively (pp. 98f. and 99f.). 102 contains a glossary to
Har8., probably made from *CbI, and 119 is probably a copy of 102
1 For explanation of the numbers of the mss see p. 193.