Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Side 21

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diocese of Skålholt, c. 1570, treats the books more summarily than the
pre-Reformation ones; sometimes only their total number is given, but
we very often meet with the remark that the church in question still
possessed ‘all the books that had been there from old’, though they had
now become ‘useless’ (DI 15, pp. 545-713).
Before the end of the century there is evidence that the old ‘useless’
books were made into new, useful ones. The Humanist Gottskålk
Jonsson, who died in 1593 as rector of Glaumbær (Skag.), wrote his
annals, the present Stockholm Kungl. Bibi. Isl. perg. 8:o, no. 5, on
vellum cut from the margins of a manuscript of considerable size, while
six leaves from a copy of the Nidaros Ordinary were used for the
cover (see Godel, pp. 109-11; ON, pp. 69-70). Another sixteenth-
century manuscript, Stockholm Kungl. Bibi. Isl. perg. 4:o, no. 5, is
palimpsest, and parts of the original manuscript, a twelfth-century
lectionary, have been left un-erased (see Godel, pp. 39-40; below pp.
80-81).
Many Icelandic-Latin medieval manuscripts, however, ended up in
the binders’ workshops, where they were used for covers, fly-leaves,
paste-downs, repairs, etc., of Icelandic-vemacular manuscripts and of
books from the Icelandic printing press. When the seventeenth-century
revival of leaming had re-kindled the Scandinavians’ interest in
Icelandic-vemacular manuscripts, historians and antiquarians compet-
ed for ownership of them, often backed by royal patronage. The scene
was set for the exodus of the Icelandic-vemacular manuscripts, of
which a great many ended up in Danish and Swedish libraries, while
others remained in Iceland. This geographical spread of the Icelandic-
vemacular manuscripts accounts for the divided provenance of the
Icelandic-Latin fragments used for their bindings. Leaves from the
same Icelandic-Latin manuscript have been identified in Reykjavik and
Stockholm, or in Reykjavik and Copenhagen.
In 1584 Bishop Gu&brandur Lorlåksson summoned a German book-
binder to Holar to bind the Icelandic Bible, translated by the Bishop
himself and printed in Holar in that year. The binder’s tools were
purchased by the Bishop, and subsequently used in the Holar work-
shop. Among the manuscripts bound in Holar is the present Stockholm
Kungl. Bibi. Isl. perg. 4:o, no. 10, with a fly-leaf and a paste-down
from two medieval manuscripts (see below, pp. 53, 76). In 1685 the
printing press of Holar together with the bookbinder’s tools were