Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1991, Blaðsíða 175
163
The sagas are in the same ord er as in S6. They are the first five sagas
in S6, except for Amicus saga which was ignored. This unit may
originally have stood first in 179.
Unit III. It is convenient to divide this unit into two.
Illa. Ff. 150-159, a gathering, containing the beginning of Clårus
saga. The continuation has been lost in a lacuna in 179.
Hib. Ff. 160-213. The end off>jalarJons saga, Flovents saga and Elis
saga, written consecutively across gathering boundaries. A gathering
ended with f. 210. It is followed by three now separate leaves, ff. 211,
212, 213.
Elis saga ends on f. 212v, and the rest of the page and the following
leaf were left blank; there is no catchword. It is conceivable that the
three leaves at the end were originally two bifolia, provided for the end
of Elis saga only. It was over-provision, hence the blank pages. The
supposed fourth leaf is now missing.
A very large amount of bjalar Jons saga is missing before f. 160.
Depending on the number of lines to the page and the width of the
written area (both of which vary a bit in 179), it would probably need
19-20 leaves. If it was in faet 20, the beginning of f>jalar Jons saga will
almost certainly have coincided with the beginning of a gathering.
Something of Clårus saga has been lost in the lacuna after f. 159, but
it is uncertain how mueh of the end of the saga 17 9 contained before
the loss occurred. S6 is in poor condition: small parts of f. 136 are
difficult to read, there is a lacuna of one leaf after f. 136, and f. 137
is fragmentary. Some of the deterioration in S6 will already have oc-
curred by sérajon’s time. If he copied some of this part of Clårus saga
and provided accurately estimated space for the rest, it will have
required c. 11 pages, i.e. three bifolia.
From the estimate ot the number of leaves required for the missing
texts, it is very unlikely that a round number of gatherings of normal
size have been lost in the lacuna. It is possible that Clårus saga ended in
a small gathering made for the purpose, and that t>jalar Jons saga
began the next one. In that case they were not connected with each
other in the manuscript, and units Illa and Illb should perhaps be
regarded as separate units.
Unit IV. Ff. 214-222. Mqttuls saga. Ff. 214 and 215 are single, 216-
221 conjugate, 222 single. The absence of a catchword on f. 214
suggests that this is the first leaf of a normal ten-leaf gathering. The