Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Page 157

Lbs 1230 8vo III: a third reading
By Desmond Slay
Lbs 1230 8vo III consists of two strips from a parchment leaf that had
been used in book binding. The texts in them, three short passages
from the end of Mirmanns saga and two from the beginning of Erex
saga, were printed by Jakob Benediktsson in Skirnir 125 (1951) and
again by Foster W. Blaisdell in his edition of Erex saga Artuskappa
(Editiones Arnamagnæanæ B 19, 1965). The latter gives a more com-
plete reading, shows abbreviations and restorations, and has a com-
mentary describing words and letters difficult to read, offering alterna-
tives and expressing reservations. The greater completeness is strik-
ingly evident at the beginning of the first fragment, where Blaisdell
has an extra 18 words (one of them dubbed “quite uncertain”). The
words in the first part of the line are so clear that it might be supposed
it was by some accidental oversight that Jakob Benediktsson did not
print them. But those in the centre are both clipped and worn, and
puzzling out this and other dark places is extremely difficult, even with
Blaisdell’s guidance.
In a prolonged scrutiny of the fragments, undertaken recently
(1984) as part of the preparation of a new edition of Mirmanns saga, I
have not been able to confirm Blaisdell’s readings in a number of
places, and in an edition would have to put more letters and words
within square brackets as conjectural than he does. Human factors
may be enough to account for this, but I wonder whether the manu-
script is slightly less legible. Although it has been generally held that
the use of ultra-violet light, unlike the application of Chemicals, does
not leave manuscripts less legible than they were before,1 it may have
1 For an account of past and present treatment of illegible manuscripts and of the
possibilities offered by new techniques, see John F. Benton, Alan R. Gillespie and
James M. Soha, ‘Digital image-processing applied to the photography of manuscripts’,
Scriptorium XXXIII (1979), 40-55.