Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Síða 30

teenth century has been kind to us, for “at that time there was a wide-
awake interest in the national literature and many men in all parts of the
country were busy in copying, studying and commenting upon the texts
which were within their reach.”39 Many of the major medieval codices,
such as the Stockholm collection of romances, were copied, and these
paper copies are now preserved in the Arnamagnæan Institute and in the
Royal Library in Copenhagen, in the British Library in London, in the
National Library of Iceland, and in the Royal Library in Stockholm. In
these important repositories of Icelandic literature can be located all the
Arthurian romances - the manuscript containing the Strengleikar except-
ed, which is in the possession of the Library of the University of Uppsala.
A comparison of the various manuscripts - especially the later paper
manuscripts - of one saga often reveals that fidelity to a text was not
necessarily a goal the scribe had set for himself. From a note attached to a
paper manuscript of Ivens saga, written by Magnus Olafsson at the end of
the seventeenth century (AM 588a 4to), we learn that the original from
which the manuscript was copied had been longer - miklu vitloftigra og
ordfyllra - and that the copyist had been interested primarily in the plot -
Seigest Magnus hafa undanfellt mestann ordafioldann, og alleinasta obser-
verad sensum efnissens - at the expense of style, it would seem. Nonethe-
less, Magnus “did not just sit down and dash off a botched summary of
the tale ... There is both system and intelligence behind the method.”40
Icelandic scribes were often conscientious editors who corrected obvious
errors and tried to “improve” the style of their texts by conforming either
to practices of their time or to their own stylistic idiosyncrasies and tastes.
A case in point is a large codex from the end of the seventeenth century,
BL Add. 4859, which contains among others Erex saga, Ivens saga, Mott-
uls saga, Parcevals saga and Valvens \)åttr. In several of these works
occur changes, additions, and omissions that seem to have been motivat-
ed by a desire to correct and improve the older redactions.41 In their
editorial capacity, the copyists also tried to supply motivation where
deemed lacking, to compose transitional passages for lacunae in a text, or
- as seems to be the case with the primary manuscripts of Erex saga -
39 Icelandic Manuscripts, p. 45.
40 Foster W. Blaisdell, “A Copyist at Work: AM 588a,” in Saga ok sprak. Studies in
Language and Literature. Ed. John M. Weinstock (Austin: The Pemberton Press, 1972), p.
37.
41 See Foster W. Blaisdell, Erex saga Artuskappa. Editiones Arnamagnæanæ B, 19 (Co-
penhagen: Munksgaard, 1965), pp. XLVIII-XLIX.
16