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exemplar, and therefore no grounds for supposing that any of the
significant changes to the text are his doing17.
If the principal changes are not the work of JV, do they then all stem
from O? It so happens that some of S 46’s most striking deviations
from the main tradition occur after F.d. 9’s item 9, Songforum, in the very
part of the saga where there is no dictionary material as evidence of
the text5 s source (i.e. all of the last third except for the closing senten-
17 For some detailed comment on JV as a copyist see, Poul Lindegård Hjorth, “Fe-
rakuts Saga, an Icelandic Fierabras”, Opuscula I, Bibliotheca Amamagnæana XX
(1960), 249, and Foster Blaisdell, “Jon Vigfusson as Copyist: the Conclusion of Ivens
saga”, Acta Philologica Scandinavica 33,1, forthcoming.
In connection with his edition. Byskupa sogur 2 (EdAM Al3,2, 1978), Jon Helga-
son has also undertaken studies that provide clues as to the nature of JV’s copying. This
work has not yet been published, and I am very grateful to Jon for making it available to
me. Jon first compares the text of Pals saga in Stockholm Papp. fol. 59 written by JV
with its exemplar in Papp. 4to 4 and comments that JV has “forgrebet sig på sagaens
tekst, som han udvider af fattig evne”. The changes made by JV do not seem to serve
any purpose other than that of lengthening the text, and they certainly do not involve
revision of the basic narrative content. They are, however, often tautologous in their
addition of synonymous or near synonymous qualifiers, and there are passages in the JV
text of Bevers saga which show a similar tautology and may therefore have been sub-
mitted to the same treatment, e.g. medur spidti edur kesiu er hann hiellt a 117r.26-28;
medur mikillri giedi ok mipk storumm fagnadi 117v. 14-16; brutu nidur o II blot hof ok
sva hqrga 121 v.31-33; enn skipti rikiumm millum peirra edur medur peim Teri ok
Mieles 124v. 18-21. Jon Helgason notices that particularly mindless expansions of text
can occur towards the ends of chapters: rather than begin a new chapter on the bottom
half of a page JV sometimes chose to lengthen the chapter that was drawing to a close
so that it filled at least a whole page in his copy. One of the most unsatisfactory pas-
sages in Bevers saga in S46 occurs in exactly this position, just before a chapter division
at the top of a page: Bievus jatar nu pessu giarnann at pat skuli nu ok allt skie ok
framm koma eptir hennar vilia sem pau ok adur i millum sin hipfdu umm talat ok sva
eiminn råd fyrir ]j giprt 118v.-l 19r. Jon further compares another work in Papp. fol. 59,
Hrafnkels saga, with its exemplar in Papp. 4to 15, and finds considerably fewer of the
sort of changes that characterised the copy of Pals saga. Jon suggests that the dif-
ference in standard between the two copies may perhaps be associated with the faet
that the exemplar of Hrafnkels saga contains many abbreviated spellings and some
concentration is needed to read it, whereas the exemplar of Pals saga is easy to read
and requires no effort of comprehension. Here it is interesting to note that O was once
described as being written with “nåstan hwart annadh ordh medh abbreviationibus” (see
EdAM A8, xiii). JV wrote in all some 32 mss. containing c. 100 texts, and in many
cases the mss. from which the texts were copied still survive today. It would take a team
of investigators very little time to test out this conjecture of Jon’s.
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