Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2007, Page 74

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3 CONTENTS AND TRANSMISSION
which would after all correspond better to the usual arrangement of
gatherings. It is not, however, likely that the copyist considered the
missing leaf to be an ordinary bifolium, since he used the designation
fo lia impacta, which I interpret as meaning ‘inserted leaves’.
It seems more likely, since the two lacunae were so close to each
other, that the copyist was also referring to the missing leaf of the sec-
ond lacuna, even though he writes in another note beside the next la-
cuna that a leaf is missing there. The faet that the verb Deest is in the
singular and not the plural required by the subject (*Desunt) may sug-
gest that the copyist originally intended the subject to be one leaf but
then decided to mention both. It is clear, moreover, that the second
lacuna has been filled in immediately; no break is visible in the text.
The first lacuna, however, was filled in later. The script has a slightly
different appearance and, when there was no more space on the page,
the rest was written on a new leaf and the place of insertion marked by
signes de renvoi. It seems that when the copyist got to the first lacuna
he left the rest of the page blank and continued to copy from K. Then,
when he got to the second lacuna, he filled in the text from / and went
back to the first lacuna to fill out the text missing there. The faet that
these two lacunae were filled in one after the other would support the
view that the copyist was thinking of both lacunae when he wrote the
note beside the first — which would therefore have been written last.
Conflicting information about the first lacuna and largely insuffi-
cient information about the contents of Kringla (the prologue) make
it difficult to determine with certainty how the defeetive gathering or
gatherings were arranged. I will not venture to decide which of the two
possibilities is the more likely: that the missing leaves were conjugate
or that they were not. If they were not conjugate, we cannot draw any
conclusions about the arrangement of the gatherings. If they were con-
jugate, it is probable that there was plenty of space for text before the
first leaf known to contain writing. In that case the missing leaves were
probably the ninth and the eleventh in the book. The tenth leaf was in