Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1991, Side 176
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1 Oth leaf, once conjugate with f. 214, may have been blank and be mis-
sing. Alternauvely, it may be somewhere else in the manuscript, and in
faet f. 1, a single leaf which is the last of a gathering, is available as
a possibility.
It very mueh looks as if units IV and I were originally consecutive
and should be regarded as one. Otherwise how can one account for the
faet that Eiriks saga begins on the last leaf of a gathering?
Support for this conclusion can be found in AM 47 7 fol. This is a
copy of the catalogue of the manuscripts left by Arni Magnusson made
in 1730 byjén Olåfsson of Grunnavik. The description of 179 begins
with ‘Saga af Eireke Vidforla’. An interlinear note has been added at
this point by a later user; it reads ‘upphaf aptast’, altered from ‘vantar
upphaf’. It seems the beginning of Eiriks saga (perhaps only the first
leaf, but possibly more) was then at the end of the manuscript. Perhaps
the rest of it, and the following KonråSs saga, were also there at an
earlier time.
Taking units IV and I as one, and separating Illa and Hib, we are still
left with a total of four units, but they are not the same four. Renum-
bering them, with a switch to arabic numerals to distinguish the new
from the old (and a change of terminology from ‘units’ to ‘booklets’
with the same purpose), we have:
Booklet 1 (= unit II). Bevers saga, Ivens saga, Parcevals saga, Valvens
båttr, Mirmanns saga.
Booklet 2 (= unit Illa). Clårus saga.
Booklet 3 (= unit Hib). I>jalar Jons saga, Flovents saga, Elis saga.
Booklet 4 (= units IV + I). Mqttuls saga, Eiriks saga, Konråhs saga.
The order in which the booklets were copied is an open question, but
booklet 1 may have been copied first, as it contains the sagas at the
beginning of S6. The first leaf of this booklet, f. 22, containing the
beginning of Bevers saga, is a substitute, not in sera Jon’s hånd; it was
inserted in the seventeenth century, replacing the original (presumably
damaged but still available and legible). This suggests that booklet 1
stood first in the anthology for a time, with no cover, placing the leaf in
an exposed position.
It is worth noticing that if booklet 2 were placed last, that would agree
with S6, for Clårus saga is the last there.
Whatever the order of the booklets, the order of the sagas within
booklets 3 and 4 is unexpected, being quite different from S6, as the
following lists show: