Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1996, Side 152

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not, there can be little doubt that if Hugh’s text was available in Bergen
at the beginning of the fourteenth century, it would also have been
known in Iceland from about the same date. However, simple refer-
fact, referred to in the Uppsala inventory, then that list must have been completed before
1314, the year of the Norwegian bishop’s death.
More recent commentators have been inclined to doubt whether there is really any solid
evidence for regarding Bishop Årni Sigurdsson as the owner of the library in question.
Mattias Tveitane has surveyed attempts made over the last century to identify the myster-
ious ‘b aqu/'la’ of UB Uppsala MS. C564 and argues that Bishop Ami entered into the dis-
cussion only as a result of a misinterpretation of the opening line of the booklist: ‘hos li-
bros possidet b aqn/la Jstum eundem sive summarø gaufridi ...’. Tveitane suggests that
Storm (‘Den Bergenske Biskop Arnes Bibliothek’, p. 186) identified the owner of these
books as ‘Bishop Ami’ only because he misread the sixth word in this opening passage,
Jstum, as ‘t Arni’ (see Tveitane, ‘Bøker og litteratur i Bergen i middelalder og reforma-
sjonstid’, Nordisk Tidskrift for Bok- och Biblioteksvasen 68 (1981), pp. 106-108). Stefan
Karlsson has objected that the epithet ‘b aqwt'la’ can hardly be a Latinized version of
‘b(iskup) Arni’. Instead, he suggests that the ‘b’ represents a first name beginning with B,
and ‘aquila’ a nickname, or the ‘eagle’ element in a family escutcheon (see Stefan Karls-
son, ‘Islandsk bogeksport til Norge i middelalderen’, Maal og Minne (1979), p. 14, n. 10).
It is true that, unless written as a suspension with a cross-bar through the ascender: ‘b’, a
simple letter ‘b’ is not recorded as an abbreviation of biskup (see, for example, Hreinn
Benediktsson, Early lcelandic Script (Reykjavfk, 1965), p. 88). However, ‘b’ frequently
stands on its own (usually written ‘b.’ or ‘.b.’) as an abbreviation of brodir (see Ibid., p.
87), a title which Arni Sigurdsson could and would have applied to himself while he was
a canon (korsbrodir) in Bergen, before he was consecrated Bishop. Furthermore, ‘b aquila’
sounds doser to normal lcelandic word order if ‘b’ is rendered brodir rather than biskup.
‘Brodir Åmi’ has the expected Norse cadence, whereas ‘Biskup Arni’ (rather than ‘Ami
Biskup’) does not. Arni Sigurdsson is mentioned as a canonicus/korsbrodir in Bergen as
early as 1292 (DN XIX, no. 372, p. 361; no. 377, p. 401), and again in 1297 (DN VI, no.
64, p. 58) and 1299 (DN VII, no. 128, p. 142). Åmi was elected Bishop of Beigen on 14
December, 1304, but was not consecrated until 5 December, 1305 (/W VII, no. 31, p. 28).
There are three documents from this interim period in which his name is mentioned. In two
of these, Åmi is referred to as electus (DN 1, no. 104 [30 Sept., 1305], p. 94; DN [V, no. 61
[20 Sept., 1305], p. 65). In the third, however, a letter written by Årni himself, he prefers
the title canonicus et electus Bergensis (DN IV, no. 60 [20 Sept., 1305], p. 65). It would ap-
pear, therefore, that Åmi could well have referred to himself as a canonicus or brodir until
the day of his consecration. It is not impossible that Bishop Årni Helgason of Skålholt
could have given Canon Årni Sigurdsson the penitential mentioned in the Uppsala booklist
some time between 25 October, 1304, the date of Åmi of Skalholt’s consecration in Ber-
gen, and the spring of 1305, when the new Bishop of Skålholt retumed to Iceland.
The word aquila may not be quite as unlikely a Latin rendering of the name ‘Årni’ as
Stefan Karlsson has suggested. As Storm noted, in his letters Alcuin frequently addresses
Bishop Amo of Salzburg (765-821) as Aquila (Storm, ‘Den Bergenske Biskop Arnes
Bibliothek’, p. 186; cf. Wattenbach and Duemmler, Monumenta Alcuiniana in P. Jaffe,
Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum VI (Berlin, 1873), e.g. Epist. 18, p. 174; cf. pp. 301,
325, 377, 381, 427-429,439, 445,447, 488, 505-507, 521, 523, 527, 557, 569, 601, 645,
662,665,674,678-681,691,693,696,702,742,747-749, 870,871,904). Similar Latin ->