Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Qupperneq 80
VI
Fragments of two Early Icelandic Manuals
The Norwegian manuals and their character of itinerant missals have
been mentioned above (ch. V). In addition to the manual proper, they
contain the Ordinary of the Mass, the great feasts of the Church Year,
a great many votive masses, the masses de domina nostra, some of
Alcuin’s votive masses, and a short Common of the saints, adapted for
the different parts of the Church Year.1 This fuller type of manual may
have been used in all the Northern countries before the age of printing.
A fourteenth-century Swedish fragment of the Ordo pro sponsis,
published by Toni Schmid, also contains a mass of the Swedish St.
Sigfrid, and may thus have belonged to the fuller type.2 The two
Icelandic manual fragments presented below may both have belonged
to this fuller type.
Manisi Fragm. 1
MS AM 678 4° (see Kålund, AM 2, p. 95) contains an abbreviated
copy of the thirteenth-century Nidaros Ordinary (= MS C, see ON,
pp. 63-64), written c. 1300 and later. The fly-leaf, which may have
served as a cover before the manuscript received its modem binding,
comes from an Icelandic manual. A bifolium of non-consecutive leaves
were used for the purpose. Of the second of these leaves, however,
only the inner margin and a few letter-spaces are extant, found as a
stub between the first and the second gathering of the manuscript, after
f. 4. The written space of the undamaged leaf, f. (1), measures
13,5/14x8,5/9 cm, with 17/18 long lines to the page. Rubrics and
initials are in red. The script, a rounded, regular book-hand, could be
1 The French manuals, dating from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, usually
contain the Canon Missae and at least three votive masses; see J. B. Molin, Pour une
bibliographie des rituels: EL 73 (1959), p. 218.
2 Toni Schmid, Beitrage zum mittelalterlichen Kultleben: EL 58 (1944), p. 85.