Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.10.1967, Page 238

212
minn fædingardagwr
Anno 1655
seems to be in a hånd contemporary with his, though it is hard to
say from his signature alone whether it is the same hånd or not.
Amgrimur’s father outlived him, and died in 1704®, so that he him-
self may not have lived to a very great age, and this date of birth
would then be quite likely for him. Nor is Amgrimur’s appearance
in t>ingeyjarj)ing, rather than Skagafjorbur, any embarrassment,
for his father, Hrolfur Sigurbsson, although he too had a share in
the government of Mngeyjarving, hved at Vibimyri, just across
Hérabsvotn from Vibivelhr, where Gunnar Gislason had lived, and
so did his father, Sigurbur Hrolfsson (c 1572-1635).
This does not, unfortunately, enable us to fill in the entire history
of the Ms., for Arngrimur was not very closely related to Gunnar
Gislason. A connexion between them can be shown, but we have
to go back to Bishop Jon Arason (killed in 1550) to make it, and
this is not relevant, for I shall later show that our Ms. cannot have
been written until nearly twenty years after the death of Bishop
Jon. But it is not necessary to draw a biood relationship between
the two families, which were both important in the same part of
Iceland, and must have had frequent dealings with each other6 7.
There is one more name attached to the Ms. which should be
mentioned. This is an inscription on a small piece of parchment
now stuck to the inner front cover of the Ms. The present binding
probably dates from 1913, and is likely to have replaced one from
the time of Årni Magnusson, for whom it was fairly common practice
to cut out such things from discarded bindings and stick them in
the new ones. The inscription reads as follows:
6 Smæ. 1:102, lÆ. 2:376. For the following detaila on Hrolfur, see these refs.,
and the preceding five pages in Smæ.
7 Perhaps the most striking example of this is the connexion between Gunnar
Gislason and the s^slumaOur Siguråur Jonsson (died 1602), who was a direct an-
cestor of Arngrimur. Both were syslumenn in HegranesJ)ing at the same time, and
both had, at different times, lived on the same farm, Reynista5ur. Further on
SigurSur, see Smæ. 1:362-6, tÆ. 4:231, Log. p. 463. This is perhaps the most
obvious connexion between Gunnar and Arngrimur, but there are so many other
ways in which the Ms. could have got from one to the other that no particular
weight can be given to it.