Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2000, Blaðsíða 338

CCCXXXVI
Fornmanna sögur I-V. The original portion of the manuscript, ff. lv-
109v, is in the clear and regular hand of a practised scribe whose work is
also found in SÁM 1 fol. (Codex Scardensis), ff. lv-81v, AM 653a 4to
and JS fragm. 7 (two fragments from the same manuscript), AM 233a
fol., ff. 15-27, AM 156 4to, and AM 238 fol., fragm. VII. It is likely that
these manuscripts were written at the monastery at Helgafell, and to
judge by their script and orthography they date from the third quarter of
the fourteenth century. AM 61 fol. perhaps belongs to the sixth decade of
the century. A distinctive characteristic of the scribe’s hand is his ab-
breviation for ær, which is written like the usual zigzag abbreviation for
er with an apostrophe-like stroke to the right.
Marginalia in the scribe’s hand occur at f. 67v: ‘f her var or blað’,
which refers to the fact that a leaf was missing in the scribe’s exemplar,
and at the bottom of the page on ff. 69v, 71r, and 72r where there are
fragments of a poem about Olaf Tryggvason written in very small letters
and partly illegible, see pp. XXXII ff.
The first known owner of AM 61 fol. was Magnús Bjömsson (ca.
1595-1662), lögmaður at Munkaþverá in Eyjafjörður. The manuscript
probably came to him with his wife Guðrún, daughter of the lögmaður
Gísli Þórðarson. Magnús gave the manuscript to Jórunn Henriksdóttir,
who was his wife’s niece and was married to the sýslumaður Benedikt
Halldórsson (ca. 1608-1688); their daughter was Ingibjörg, second wife
of Bishop Gísli Þórðarson of Hólar (1631-1684), and it was she who took
the manuscript with her to Hólar. Bishop Gísli’s third wife was Ragn-
heiður Jónsdóttir, sister of Oddur Jónsson (1648-1711). Oddur gave the
manuscript to Christofer Heidemann, probably in 1687, in which year
Heidemann sailed for Copenhagen where he presented the manuscript to
Thomas Bartholin. Ámi Magnússon acquired the manuscript after Bar-
tholin’s death in 1689.
AM 53 fol. (B) is a vellum manuscript containing only ÓlTr. It has 72
leaves, the largest measuring 29 x 22 cm, written in two columns with
the number of lines per column fluctuating between 39, 40, and 41. B
originally consisted of 12 gatherings comprising with just a few excep-
tions four bifolia, i.e. eight leaves per gathering; but over time 27 leaves
have been lost at 13 different places in the codex, including nine leaves
(one whole gathering of eight leaves and the first leaf of the next gathering)
after f. 26. The gatherings were numbered, probably from the beginning,
with the Roman numerals ‘í-xíj’; most of these numerals are legible at
the bottom of the last pages of the surviving gatherings.
Four hands are found in B: Hand I wrote ff. l-4r (I 1.1-36.20 ‘Har-