Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.10.1979, Blaðsíða 135
109
Hypothetical Chart of Foreign Romances in Scandinavia, but in a
footnote he points out that a manuscript containing the saga about this
knight no longer exists10. Furthermore, Leach suggests - in the section
conceming the Strengleikar - that there had been an “independent
version of Guiamar”, that is, of Guiamars Ijod (p. 207). Leach’s
hypothesis seems to be based on Halfdan Einarsson’s and P. E.
Miiller’s references to a saga about an English knight named Gvimar.
3.
The notion that Gvimars saga is a literary entity distinet from
Guiamars Ijod may have arisen because of a tendency to consider the
Strengleikar compilation a single unit. We have known the various lais
only as they appear in the Norwegian manuscript De la Gardie 4-7.
Moreover, several entries in a seventeenth-century dictionary may
have re-enforced speculation conceming the existence of a different
Icelandic version - as distinguished from a redaction - of Guiamars
Ijod. One of the sources consulted by the lexicographer Olaus Verelius
to compile his Index Lingvæ Veteris Scytho-Scandicæ sive Gothicce
(Upsala, 1691) is the now no longer extant Ormr Snorrason’s Book,
Ormsbok, an Icelandic manuscript, probably from the fourteenth
century". In several entries Verelius’ dictionary cites passages from a
certain Gvimars saga (orthography varies in the Index) in Ormsbok
(abbreviated in the Index as Cod. Orm.). Nonetheless, in the list of
sources from which the dictionary was compiled, Verelius neither cites
Gvimars saga as one of the works contained in Ormsbok nor even as a
separate item.
The lexicographer does enter separately - and at some remove from
Ormsbok - Bretta Streinglekr / Roberti Abbatis. This source can be
readily identified as the manuscript De la Gardie 4-7, or at least parts
of this manuscript, namely Pamphilus, Elis saga, and the Strengleik-
ar. This is clear from the faet that throughout these texts words have
been underlined, evidently for lexicographical purposes, and the
10 Angevin Britain and Scandinavia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921),
p. 382.
11 For a discussion of Ormsbok and its contents, see Jonna Louis-Jensen, Troju-
manna Saga. Edit. Amamagnæanæ, Series A, vol. 8 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard,
1963), pp. xi-xv.