Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2007, Page 71

3.2 Condition in the seventeenth century
41
lacuna covers 1164 lines in the 1911 edition, so that the average number
of lines in the 1911 edition corresponding to each leaf in the two lacu-
nae, on the intervening leaf and on the extant Kringla leaf is 175. With
script of the same density the quantity of text before the first lacuna
would have required six or seven leaves. When the vellum was copied,
therefore, the lost leaves in the first part must have been the eighth and
the tenth.28
In view of the faet that there were two leaves missing in an otherwise
complete manuscript and that they were very close to each other, it is
tempting to posit that the two leaves were conjugate. This could form
the basis for a reconstruction of the first two gatherings, which would
in its turn contribute to the discussion about the prologue. It should,
however, be emphasised that it is not necessarily the case, and perhaps
not even highly probable, that the two missing leaves were conjugate.
If they were not, they could have come from anywhere in the gathering
and, strietly speaking, need not have belonged to the same gathering at
all.
If we do, however, assume that the leaves were conjugate, then they
must have constituted the top sheet in the gathering. There must have
been a singleton between them. The missing leaves would then have
been the third and fiffh in the second gathering, i. e. fol. 9 and fol. 11.
The preserved text in the first gathering would then not have covered
more than five leaves. Before it there may have been a blank flyleaf,
or perhaps the prologue. The quantity of text in the prologue to Hkr
would correspond to one page in the manuscript.
28 In the introduction to his multi-volume edition Finnur Jonsson writes that the miss-
ing leaves are “åbenbart læggets 3. og 7. blad” (‘obviously the third and seventh in
the gathering’, HkrFJ I: iii). It is equally obvious that he must have calculated this
incorrectly. The text between the two missing leaves cannot have covered three
whole leaves.