Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1970, Blaðsíða 293

267
he wrote about them on f.66v he says nothing about the origin
of the manuscript from which he took them. He describes it as
not badly written, and also says: Allt hellt eg mig geta par lesed,
nema å seinustu 4 eda 5 biddum, var efsta linan par afskorin, svo
eg haf de hennar eingin not.
The variants are extensive, and pro vide sufficient material to
show their textual relationship to the surviving copies of the saga.
In Bibi. Arnam. XXIV, p. 66, there is a list of variants char-
acteristic of J27. In about half of these passages it is possible to
compare A and J27, and they always agree. There is no indication,
in these passages or elsewhere in the saga, that A is derived from
a manuscript antecedent to J27. It is also the case that A cannot
be derived directly from J27 itself, because the leaves of J27 are
still all intact whereas the last few leaves of the source of A were
defective (cf. Halldor Hjålmarsson’s note above). Further, every
extant copy of the saga derived from J27 (stemma in Bibi. Amam.
XXIV, p. 86) has variants of its own in places where A still has
the same wording as J27, so that A cannot be derived from any
of these. The conclusion is that A is derived from a lost copy of
J27. Finally, the peculiarities of A given below show that this
lost copy of J27, which we must assume to be faithfully represented
by A, cannot have been intermediate between J27 and any of the
other manuscripts derived from it4 * * *.
The following are a few of the variants characteristic of A:
99 aptur snua 285, J27] epter verda A
12u margir ådrer] -s-
158 vera - annarz] annan feigan
4 There has been considerable doubt about J27, but it is now known that
the hånd in J27 is the same as that in B.M. Add. 4868, and in the latter the title-
page States that the manuscript was written for Magnus Jonsson ad Angre vid
Jsafiård (better known as Magmis Jonsson i Vigur), and that it was written af
Magnuse Poriilfssijne Anno 1667. To the account of Magnus ]>6rolfsson given
in t.Æ. III, 465, it can be added that he came into the service of Magnus J6ns-
son by 1662 (a letter written by Magnus Jonsson in VatnsfjorSur on Dee. 28th,
1662, preserved in AM 1058, 4to, III, was to be delivered by Magnus Uorolfsson),
and also that he was a bearer of money to the bishop on June 20th, 1665 (AM 276,
fol., Bréfabok Brynjolfs Sveinssonar XV, p. 12). Information from Peter Spring-
borg, Lise Præstgaard Andersen and Stefan Karlsson.