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text where there is no direct evidence about his source (see pp. 146-
47 below).
Broberg’s tentative suggestion that Bevers saga and other works in
S46, as well as Mirmants saga in S47, might be copied from a fore-
runner of O (BrobOS, 65-66) was made at a time when there was
almost no evidence of a connection between the sagas in S46 and O.
He did not make use of the dictionary collections F.d.9, LB and LBB,
which have since been used to establish this link. It is not impossible
that another manuscript containing texts similar to those in O existed
in Stockholm in the second half of the seventeenth century but was lost
in the fire of 1697 without ever being catalogued10, but it is an outside
chance. The correspondence between the dictionary material and the
S46 text makes it almost certain that JV did in faet copy from O at
least those parts of Bevers saga for which there is dictionary material
as corroborative evidence, and this assertion is very important to any
attempt to establish the earliest possible text of Bevers saga.
O, dated 1350-1400 (EdAM A8, xxx-xxxi), was apparently an older
manuscript than either S6 (c. 1400)* 11 or S7 (c. 1470)12, and these
latter two manuscripts, together with two small medieval fragments,
have otherwise had to be rebed upon as witnesses of the saga. It is,
however, typical of a number of JV texts of riddarasogur that derive
from O that they deviate considerably from the texts in the surviving
medieval manuscripts and appear to give correspondingly poorer repre-
sentations of the archetypes. Bevers saga fails squarely into this
pattem and seems in faet to have undergone the most radical revision
yet noted. Gustav Cederschiold, the first editor of Bevers saga,
believed that JV had taken his material from S7, or one of its copies,
but that he had “ingalunda nojt sig med sitt originals uppgifter, utan
helt ogeneradt gjort tillågg, uteslutningar och andra omarbetningar”13.
S orne years after the appearance of Cederschiold’s edition, A.
10 Cf. V. Godel, Fornnorsk-islåndsk litteratur i Sverige (Stockholm, 1897), 194-95,
where the eventuality of such a loss is considered.
11 D. Slay ed., Romances: Perg. 4:o Nr 6 in the Royal Library, Stockholm, Early
Icelandic Manuscripts in Facsimile X (Copenhagen, 1972), 21.
12 Jonas Kristjånsson ed., Viktors saga ok Bldvus, Riddarasogur II (Reykjavik:
Handritastofnun Islands, 1964), xvi.
13 Gustaf Cederschiold ed., Fornsogur Suårlanda (Lund, 1884; reprint of Lunds
Universitets Årsskrift XIII-XV, XV1I1-XIX), ccxxxix.