Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2005, Side 51
Observations on Some Manuscripts of Egils saga
41
§ 13. 143
As is well known, the text in editions of Egils saga is based almost en-
tirely on M. This choice of text has, however, certain disadvantages.
One problem is the loss of two leaves in M. These were conjunct and
formed the outer pair of leaves in a quire; the lost text corresponds to
EgEA I, chs. 44,45-46,32 and 56,124-260. Finnur Jonsson filled the
first lacuna from two B-manuscripts: first fragment 8 as far as it goes,
i.e. to EgEA I, ch. 45,3, and then W. For the second lacuna he used ff
until its second leaf ends at ch. 56,190, and then again W. While the text
of li is excellent, that of 8 and W (especially W) is inferior, and using W
is in the nature of a last resort.
Another problem is that some pages of M are in such a bad State that
little or nothing can be read in certain passages. This is notoriously true
of f. 99v, the page containing Arinbjarnarkvida, though that page is not
actually part of the saga. In the saga proper it seems possible to deci-
pher all the bad pages with the exception of one, f. 69v (EgEA I, ch.
21,19-22,56). Certainly Finnur Jonsson succeeded in reading the whole
of this page with the exception of the first lines of the left-hand column,
but it would be almost a miracle if his reading were faultless. The rea-
son why the page is so illegible would seem not only to be that earlier
readers, as was the usual practice, have moistened it: some destructive
substance has most likely also been applied in the hope of bringing out
the writing. Consequently exposure of the parchment to the wonders of
artificial light, which is often of great help in other situations, is com-
pletely useless on this page; all that happens is that the letters retreat
even deeper into the black background.
There are, however, copies of M from the seventeenth century. The
two oldest are doubtless AM 145 fol. in the hånd of Jon Gissurarson å
Nupi (d. 1648) and JS 28 fol. in the hånd of the Rev. Jon Erlendsson f
Villingaholti (d. 1672). These manuscripts share certain errors and must
have been copied from a common exemplar, probably written in north-
em Iceland (where M itself was located) but subsequently lost. This ex-
emplar cannot have come into existence much after 1640. It is out of the
question that Jon Gissurarson copied directly from M and Jon Erlends- 144
son from the copy by his namesake, for 145 contains many errors that
are not in 28.
Other Egils saga manuscripts in this category include (at least) AM