Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1975, Page 266
A Fragment of Gyåinga saga.
By Howard Martin.
AM 594b 4to is a badly damaged paper MS containing 21 leaves,
all written in the same rather coarse hånd of the seventeenth cen-
tury. No two leaves are conjoint since they have moulded away
at the margins. Furthermore, other parts of some of the leaves are
lacking. According to Kålund’s catalogue description, the MS con-
tains only Flores saga oh Leo1 and the last page, f. 21v, is blank.
Since February, 1888, when Kålund made these observations, the
MS has been restored and rebound. At the time of restoration, i.e.,
1964, it was stated that two of the 21 leaves did not belong to the
Flor es saga\ they were then placed af ter the other nineteen leaves
so that the blank page became f. 19v. To what the content of the
leaves 20 and 21 does belong was a question perhaps not raised and
definitely not answered at that time. It is, therefore, to that very
question that this paper addresses itself.
Examination of the leaves 20 and 21 reveals that they are a frag-
ment of Gydinga saga, that saga concerning the history of the Jews
from the time of Alexander the Great to the time of Pilate’s death
and reputedly put into Icelandic by Brandr Prestr Jonsson in the
mid thirteenth century. More specifically, the leaves contain epi-
sodes from the latter part of Gydinga saga: their content corres-
ponds to part of the chapter dealing with the death of Augustus,
the chapters on the birth and youth of Pontius Pilate and Judas
Iscariot, and the beginning of the chapter where Adrianus, Pilate’s
messenger to Tiberius, encounters Vespasianus. The content of the
fragment corresponds in the main to page 87 line 27 (8727) through
1 The Flores saga ok Leo, taken from the Kaiser Oetavianus cyele, is a transla-
tion of a Danish or German Volksbuch according to Danske Folkeboger, Vol. IV,
p. xxvx.