Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Page 187
XI
The Private Prayers of MS AM 241 a fol.
Ff. (25)r2-(26)v2 = pp. 31-34: Drottinn Ihesus Christus så er komt i
t>enna heim fyrir vårar sakir synSugra manna. .. hér ok *å *ukominni
(af komiNi cod.) ti6. per infinita secula seculorum. xncm (o: amen).
This text was first edited by f>. Bjarnarson, Leifar (1878), pp. 182-85. It was re-
edited by M. M. Lårusson, Doktorsvorn (1960), pp. 103-10, together with the Latin
text from the Pseudo-Alcuin collection, PL 101, cols. 476D-479A, ‘Domine Jesu
Christe, qui in hunc mundum propter peccatores de sinu Patris advenisti...’
The other modem editions are:
from the mid-eleventh-century Canterbury manuscript, Brit. Mus. Arundel 155, with
an interlinear Anglo-Saxon gloss, by F. Holthausen, Altenglische Interlinearversionen:
Anglia NF 53 (Halle 1941), pp. 242-46;
from the late eleventh-century Portiforium of Saint Wulstan, 2 (1960), pp. 3-5.
It has been added in a Caroline hånd from c. 1100 in the Celtic Psalter, Edinburgh
Univ. Library MS 56, ff. 48v-49v, and is cut short by a lacuna at ‘credo quod tu pius es
noli me relinquere’; see the facsimile edition: Umbrae codicum occidentalium, 7 (Am-
sterdam 1962).
For the manuscript tradition of this prayer, see Wilmart, The Prayers of the Bury
Psalter (1930), pp. 202-03: The greater part of this prayer is found as two separate
prayers in the Book of Ceme, no. [18], pp. 111-14, and no. [22], pp. 119-20, the second
text beginning ‘Auxiliatrix esto’. This second text appears as a separate prayer in eighth-
century books and in the Caroline prayer books of the early ninth century, ed.
Wilmart, Precum libelli (1940), pp. 13, 42, 68. It is also in the late ninth-century Ech-
ternach sacramentary, MS Paris lat. 9433, f. 14v.
The oldest manuscript in which these two prayers have been linked together is the
ninth-century Angers Psalter (see Leroquais, Les Psautiers, 1, pp. 23 sqq.), where it is
inscribed to St. Augustine, with an injunction that reappears in a great many
manuscripts, for instance in the Bury Psalter:
Incipit inquisitio Sancti Augustini de ista oratione in quacumque die cantauerit
aliquis istant orationem non nocebit illi diabolus neque ullus homo inpedimentum
facere potest. Et quod iustum petierit a deo dabitur ei. Et si anima sua egrediatur de
corpore in infemum non exiet.
Wilmart remarked upon the great variations in this prayer from one manuscript to
another. Thus the text of the Portiforium of Saint Wulstan and that of our manuscript
are rather close to the PL edition, while the Canterbury text presents a shorter version,