Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1985, Síða 159

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bottom of it read previously as part of a ‘y’. The ‘k’ stands. The alleged
abbreviation for ‘er’ I think is no more than a part of the ‘k’, the
common stroke down to the right from the top of the ascender. So that
‘J?yker' is actually ‘s. Ok’, with a tall ‘s’.
About ‘sia’ Blaisdell says that it looks very much like ‘sla’. I read
these letters as ‘sta’. The top of the tall ‘s’ comes over to join the top of
the ‘t’ in the common manner seen also elsewhere in the fragments;
minute traces of the cross-stroke of the ‘t’ are just visible.
About ‘fegurzt’ Blaisdell says that the ‘r’ is now run together with
the ‘u’ and is hard to distinguish. I think this is only one letter, namely
an ‘a’. No comment is made on the ‘g’, but this looks strange however
it is read. It has been altered or smudged, and I read it as ‘st’ (with tall
‘s’) though it is only partly legible as such.
Altogether, therefore, for Blaisdell’s ‘(køngs) Jjyker sia fegurzt par i
\anåi' I read ‘(kongs.) Ok stafestazt par i lamli’.
Neither of the versions of the end of the saga printed by E. Kolbing
in his edition of the saga in Riddarasogur (1872) has anything like
either of these readings, Blaisdell’s or mine. Kolbing was aware of the
existence of two other versions in seventeenth-century manuscripts;
other late manuscripts seem to me at present to offer two more. These
also do not have either phrase.
Concerning the form ‘stafestazt’ for ‘stadfestazt’, there are two
things to be said. First, that the ‘a’ and the ‘f are close to each other,
and there is no possibility that the manuscript once had a ‘d’ there.
Second, that an editor would have to decide whether to regard it as a
spelling mistake and correct it, or regard it as indicating a sporadic
pronunciation and let it stand - a rare example of a phonological
development attested in other Scandinavian languages but not in Ice-
landic apparently.
The other new reading I have to offer is instead of the word ‘j)e^a’
in ‘{)essa daga’, fragment b, recto line 3. Blaisdell says of it that “in
pessa the p is very unclear; it might also be read pria with ri abbrevi-
ated”. The ‘J>ma’ or ‘jjn'a’ is tight up to the left-hand edge of the
fragment, and whatever preceded it has been clipped off. Examining it
in bright sunlight I have come to the conclusion that the first letter is
not ‘t>’ but ‘k’; the upright and the upper part of the two-storeyed bow
are clear, and the lower part of the bow is just about visible. I see the
abbreviation as the sign for ‘ur’, and so read ‘[nocjkara’.
The context is a matter for conjecture. Small parts of the right-hand