Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Page 74

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Panmure (now Dalhousie) family. It may seem curious that a scholar
of such long standing should require a younger official to act as his
guarantor when borrowing materials from Lord Panmure; the
explanation is, however, doubtless to be sought in the disgrace which
Thomson had incurred in 1839, when he was discharged from his
Office of Deputy Clerk-Register for financial negligence.41
Laing’s note of 27 August 1850, though not lacking in irony, is
devoid of critical remarks on Munch’s results, and - as already men-
tioned - neither Scandinavian nor Scottish authorities have ever
expressed doubt on the theory of origins which Munch developed in
his preface. This display of credulity can scarcely be put down to the
inaccessibility of the Danish archivalia which provided the starting-
point for Munch’s speculations; his own published facsimiles ought to
have been sufficient evidence that the construction was palæogra-
phically untenable. The point may be verified by comparison of my
samples from the Copenhagen documents in plates Ia-Ib and from the
Dalhousie manuscript in plates II-III: not only are the two letters to
the king of Denmark in different hånds, but these hånds are also
considerably older than that of the Dalhousie manuscript. Munch’s
error is understandable to the extent that a scholar of his time would
inevitably base a scribal identification on considerations of historical
context rather than on what would now be accepted as serious
palæographical arguments. A localization of the Dalhousie manuscript
in the Orkneys certainly seems to suggest itself if one wrongly assumes
- with Nicolson and Munch - that the note by Thomas Tulloch directly
refers not to the printed copy of Rolewinck’s Fasciculus but to the
manuscript, and if one’s attention is exclusively focused on the first
three articles, which deal with Norwegian and Orcadian subject-mat-
ter. However, a review of the entire contents of the manuscript places
the question in a different perspective, for the articles not specially
studied by Munch are all Scottish. The eight articles in the manuscript
are as follows:
41 For Macdonald and Thomson see Dictionary of National Biography XXXV (Lon-
don, 1893), p. 29, and LVI (1898), pp. 269-71.