Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Blaðsíða 67
63
earl’s own command.31 This line of reasoning was of course greatly
strengthened by the faet that art. 2 in the manuscript, the Genealogy
of the Orkney earls, is an address to the Dano-Norwegian crown
explicitly defending William Sinclair’s title to his earldom.
Munch’s theory impressed his own countrymen and was not
opposed by Scottish scholars, and it has been allowed to stand unchal-
lenged to this day. Moreover, Norwegian writers have ignored
Munch’s published remarks and have credited him with the discovery
as well as the exploitation of the Dalhousie manuscript. Gustav Storm
made a fundamental contribution to the growth of this scholarly
mythology by stating in 1880 that Munch had ‘found the manuscript in
Scotland and proved that it was written in the Orkneys’;32 and as
recently as 1969 Astrid Salvesen wrote that the manuscript had been
‘found in Scotland by P. A. Munch in 1849’ and ‘originated in the
Orkneys c. 1450’.33 Similar remarks are to be found scattered through-
out Scandinavian historiographical literature. Nothing, however,
could be further from the truth than that Munch had discovered the
Dalhousie manuscript by himself. It had been brought to Edinburgh
some years before his visit and had been studied there by Scottish
scholars connected with the Bannatyne Club: as early as 1847 Cosmo
Innes had published an extract from it in the Club’s edition of the
Inchaffray Register,34 and by the time that Munch arrived in Scotland
the extracts later printed by Laing in The Bannatyne Miscellany III
(1855) had clearly been set up in type. Proof of this last point is
already afforded by a letter which Munch wrote to Laing on 30
September 1849, the day after his arrival in the Orkneys. The text of
the letter reveals that Munch had not yet seen the Dalhousie manu-
script, but that his interest in it had been aroused by the perusal of
proof sheets of Laing’s later Miscellany contribution which the Scots-
man had lent to his foreign visitor.35
31 Symbolæ, pp. II-III.
32 Monumenta, p. XX.
33 Norges historie (...), oversatt av Astrid Salvesen (Oslo, 1969), p. 9.
34 Cf. reference in n. 22 above.
35 Lærde brev I, 393-94, no. 207. That the third volume of BM was a long time in the
making appears also from the faet that the first item, “Two Ancient Records of the
Bishopric of Caithness” (ed. Cosmo Innes, pp. 1-24), had been pre-printed in 1848 with
the subtitle “Contributed by the Duke of Sutherland to the Miscellany of the Bannatyne
Club.”