Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1991, Qupperneq 110
A Fragment of a Gregorius saga in AM 238 fol. X
by Kirsten Wolf
In his edition of Gregorius saga C.R. Unger based the text on the
fourteenth-century codex Stockholm Perg. fol. no. 2, 29v-34v (Heil-
agra manna søgur (Hms) I [Chrisuania, 1877], pp. 377-39518). The text
of the saga as it appears in the codex is, however, defective; the end of
the saga is missing due to a lost gathering.1 A fragment of the saga in
the Riksarkiv in Oslo (NRA fragm. 71, lr) from the thirteenth century
is printed on pp. 39520-3961 2 3 to fill out a secdon of the lacuna in
Stockholm Perg. fol. no. 2.2 Fragments, which were not used by Unger
and which, according to Widding, Bekker-Nielsen, and Shook3,
belong to the same saga, are AM 921 4to IVfrom c. 1250-1275 (edited
by Gustav Morgenstern in Arnamagnæanische Fragmente [Leipzig -
Copenhagen, 1893], pp. 47-49; and by Hreinn Benediktsson, The Life
of St. Gregory and his Dialogues, Edit. Arn. B:4 [Copenhagen, 1963], pp.
51-53) and AM 238 fol. X, which is discussed and edited below. The
former fragment corresponds to Hms I, pp. 39238-3953, the latter to
Hms I, pp. 38015-38113.
1 Peter Foote says: »At the end of fol. 34 the text ends abruptly in the middle of the
Gregorius saga, which presumably conrinued in a now lost gathering. There is of course
no way of knowing what else that lost gathering may have contained, because the next
extant gathering begins with a new text. ... The gathering was lost comparatively early,
since the writer of the foliation numbers ignores its absence.« (Lives of Saints: Perg. fol.
nr. 2 in the Royal Library, Stockholm. Early Icelandic Manuscripts in Facsimile 4
[Copenhagen, 1962], p. 7).
2 Cf. Unger: »Et ubetydeligt Bidrag til at fylde noget af Lacunen i Cd. Holm. 2 folio
har et Fragment af et Pergamentblad i norske Rigsarkiv ydet; kun de øverste 14 Linier
ere tilbage, og Forsiden af dette Blad maa rimeligvis have sluttet Gregorius Saga, thi paa
Bagsiden begynder 4de Bog af hans Dialoger ...« (Hms I, p. xiii).
3 Ole Widding, Hans Bekker-Nielsen, L.K. Shook, »The Lives of the Saints in Old
Norse Prose: A Handlist«, Mediaeval Studies 25 (1963), p. 311.