Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1970, Qupperneq 350

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It has not been possible to attribute all the Mss. of these binding-
types to any single locality or period38. Each type makes up about
11 per cent of the Icelandic membranes from which I have got
some result, so the chance of any two Icelandic membranes both
showing Double Binding wouid seem to be around 11 per cent of
11 per cent, or slightly over 1 per cent.
But even this coincidence wouid not make the two fragments
appear to correspond in the number and positions of the holes.
I have found only one case, among Mss. of this type which there
is no reason to connect with each other, in which two Mss. may
show measurements similar enough to give the impression of
belonging together39; this must be partly a matter of personal
judgment, but even this apparent correspondence was arrived at
only by allowing more generous margins of error than were needed
to show a correspondence between our two fragments. If the chance
38 I have also examined 108 membrane Mss. and fragments in the Amamagnæan
Collection which come from outside Iceland; here there appeared one example
of “Double Binding” (AM 95b, 4to, from the second half of the 16th century;
Norwegian), and four of the “small 4to” type (AM 233,11, 8vo, cl500, and AM
455, 12mo, cl300, both Danish legal Mss.; AM 72, 8vo, 15th century, a book of
devotions for a nun, probably Danish; and AM 203, 8vo, 14th century, a Latin
school-book, of uncertain origin, but obtained by Arni Magnusson in Denmark.
All these four have the two strings of each pair unusually far apart, relative to
their small size). However, it wouid be unwise to construet any theory about
binding methods anywhere outside Iceland on the basis of so little evidence—
although the greatest number of these Mss. come from Norway (42, of which at
least one may in faet be Faroese) and Denmark (including Skåne—40), there
are also some from Germany (9), Sweden (6), Holland (4), Spain (3), France (2),
England (1) and Italy (1). Many of these may in any case have been re-bound
at one time or another, not necessarily in the country of their origin.
39 Even this case is uncertain. AM 385,1, 4to appears to have “Double Binding”
with three pairs of binding-holes, but the upper hole of the middle pair is smaller
than the others, and may arise from incidental damage. AM 651,11, 4to comes
from the same codex (see Agnes Agerschou: “Et fragment af Jons saga baptista”,
Opuscula I, pp. 100-101), but here the middle of the inner edge of the Ms. is
damaged, and it is not possible to see whether there was a middle pair of holes
or not. This codex dates from the second half of the 14th century. If it is assumed
to have had “Double Binding”, its measurements wouid be similar to those of
AM 575a, 4to, which dates from the 15th century. Further on AM 651,11, 4to
see EAA7, Indledning, p. xxxviii; on AM 575a, 4to, see Dinus saga Drambldta,
ed. Jonas Kristjånsson, Keykjavik, 1960, Inngangur, pp. i-xv.