Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1970, Page 344
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203 and 217 mm., the average being 208 mm. This discrepancy can
hardly be significant.
One must distinguish between the widths of inner and outer
columns, for most scribes make their inner columns wider than
their outer ones—but the ratio of one column to the other varies,
and the aggregate width of both is therefore also important.
Inner col.
Outer col.
Aggregate
AM 445c, I
100-107 mm.
82-93 mm.
185-195 mm.
AM 564a
91-97 mm.
86-93 mm.
182-190 mm.
The ratio of inner to outer columns varies between the fragments,
but the difference between the aggregates is not enough to make it
unlikely that both come from the same codex.
5.2. How well would the fragments of Viga-Glums saga fit into
each other? Professor Jon Helgason, in his edition of AM 445c,1,26
has calculated that if the version found there had been equally com-
pressed throughout by the scribe of Modruvallabok, the saga would
originally have filled 12 leaves, but the first leaf would also have
contained the end of another saga, and f. 1 of AM 445c,I would have
been the fourth of these leaves. Since the fragments in AM 564a
are longer than Modruvallabok to a similar extent, we should
expect, if they came from the same codex as AM 445c,I, that the
limits of their contents should almost coincide with those to be ex-
pected of later leaves in Jon Helgason’s scheme.
He calculates that each leaf of this Ms. would have covered
the equivalent of 145 lines of Turville-Petre’s text of the Modruvalla-
bok version of the saga. He appears to count four lines of verse
as being equal to one of prose, which may be allowing the verses
marginally too little space, and a small error in the other direction
is induced by the division of paragraphs in Turville-Petre’s edition,
whereby a few almost empty lines are counted as if they were full.
But the unknown element in Jon Helgason’s calculations is so
great, and his conclusions so modestly offered, that these tiny
variables can make no detectable difference, and we may accept
his figures gratefully.
26 Jon Helgason, op. cit., Indledning, pp. 11-14.