Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Qupperneq 144
126
feast was sanctioned by the Icelandic Althing in 1326. Thus 1326
seems to be the terminus ante quem non of our calendars AM
249p = A. and AM 249e = B, which do include this entry, and,
consequently, the psalters A and B could not be dated earlier than the
second quarter of the fourteenth century. The same test cannot be
applied to the calendar AM 249f=F, since the leaf containing the
month of December has been written, or re-written, by a later
fourteenth-century hånd.
Another landmark of the Icelandic calendar is 8/12 Conceptio
sancte Marie, sanctioned by the Althing in 1364.3 It has been added
by more recent hånds in all our five calendars except AM
249m = s, where it does not appear.
Some of the individual features of these calendars are interesting.
AM 249p=A, and AM 249f=F add after 17/12, O sapientia, the
mnemotechnical word sarcore, marking the sequence of the seven O-
antiphons before Christmas (O sapientia, O Adonay, O radix lesse, O
clauis Dauid, O oriens splendor, O rex gentium, O Emmanuel) of the
Nidaros use.
An early addition to AM 249p=A is the unique entry of 13/6
ellendi episcopi, which refers to Erlendr, bishop of the Faeroe Isles
1269-1308, honoured as a saint in his diocese.4 A very late addition to
this calendar is that of 22/9 Heimramme m., that is, St. Emmeram of
Regensburg, who occurs in the early Scandinavian martyrological ca-
lendars; a late-medieval entry, however, is likely to reflect a special ve-
neration for this saint. The church of Oddi (Rang.) possessed a
likeness of St. Emmeram in 1397 (DI 4, p. 75), which was still there
in 1488 (DI 6, p. 630). Could our manuscript have strayed eastward
to Oddi in the fifteenth century, or, was the cult of St. Emmeram a
feature of late-medieval Icelandic piety? An Icelandic prymer, written
by Jon £>orlåksson, Brit. Mus. MS Add. 4895 duodez., contains a
series of suffrages in the midst of which St. Emmeram is invoked, ff.
7v-8r. See Plate 132.
3 See Islandske annaler indtil 1578. Ed. G. Storm (Christiania 1888), p. 360. In
1365, the bishop of Holar introduced the feast in his diocese; see DI 3, pp. 205-07.
4 See Erkebiskop Henrik Kalteisens Kopibog. Ed. A. Bugge (Christiania 1899), pp.
203-04.