Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Qupperneq 77

69
III
Munch himself admitted that the many errors in the treatment of
Norse names in the Dalhousie manuscript pointed to the scribe having
been a Scot. To this may be added that the orthography of art. 4,
which is the only Scots vernacular piece in the compilation, makes it
quite clear that the scribe was here writing in his native tongue.46 The
date of transcription of the manuscript can be more precisely deter-
mined by a study of the two Scottish items, arts. 4 and 8, that can be
shown to have concordances in other sources. Of these, the vernacular
art. 4 recurs not only in the miscellany known as the Asloan manu-
script but also in an addition to a copy of Wyntoun’s verse chronicle of
Scotland; art. 8 is a Latin text, a vernacular version of which corres-
pondingly appears both as an item in the Asloan miscellany and as an
appendix to copies of Wyntoun.
The extent of these parallels between the Dalhousie manuscript and
pre-Reformation Scottish vernacular sources has not previously been
recognized. W. A. Craigie, who was responsible for the edition of the
Asloan manuscript published by the Scottish Text Society in the 1920s,
observed that the Chronicle of Scotland in a Part, art. 4 in the
Dalhousie manuscript, corresponds in content to an item entitled
“The Scottis originale” transcribed at ff. 93-98 of the Asloan manu-
script; because of the considerable textual differences between the two
versions he was inclined to think that they represented “independent”
translations “from a [lost] Latin original.”47 He was evidently unaware
that the same piece occurs in a third source, viz. British Library MS
Roy. 17 D. xx, an important manuscript of the Original Chronicle of
the Augustinian canon Andrew of Wyntoun, who was prior of St Serf’s
in Loch Leven at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the
fifteenth century. Roy. 17 D. xx has traditionally been dated much too
46 Munch was aware of both of these points, though he failed to emphasize the
second. Cf. Symbolæ, p. III: “Scribam fuisse Scotum, non Noricum, ex eo apparet,
quod omnia, quæ in ipso codice anglice aut scoto-anglice scripta sunt, nullis laborant
mendis, dum e contrario multa nominum Noricorum, quæ passim occurrunt, tam male
sunt corrupta, ut luce clarius liqueat, ipsum sonum et pronunciationem vocum Nori-
corum ei fuisse inusitatum.”
47 W. A. Craigie (ed.), The Asloan Manuscript: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse, STS
n.s. 14 & 16 (1923-25), I, vii. The piece here under discussion is printed at I, 185-96.