Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2000, Blaðsíða 341

CCCXXXIX
The parchment used for this manuscript was of poor quality, some
leaves with holes and many with tears (some of these quite big) that have
been sewn up before the text was written. There are two columns to the
page, mainly with 40 lines per column though columns of 38, 39,41, and
42 lines also occur (see p. LXXXVII). The initial letters of chapters are
coloured in yellow, red, green, and blue, and the titles of chapters are
written in red or occasionally blue, blue-black, or green. Sometimes
drawings of fish or spiral decorations replace the chapter titles. The illum-
inator is the same person as worked on Perg. 4:o nr 16 (see p. XCI).
Two subsidiary hands appear on f. llr. The first (Hand II) wrote f.
1 lral7-40 ‘fyR nefndr-ar’ (1257.18-262.20, lower text), while the second
(Hand III) wrote f. llrbl 1-40 ‘Marg/r-ketils’ (I 268.1-17 ‘Margir-eyðz’
and 265.12-22 ‘Ketill-Ketils’). With these exceptions the whole manu-
script is in one and the same hand, that of an experienced professional
scribe. The same hand, or one so closely related that it is scarcely possible
to distinguish between them, is found in a letter written in 1377 at Staður
in Reynines, Skagafjörður (AM Fasc. III 8); this hand recurs in the re-
mains of 10 manuscripts including AM 122b fol. (see p. CIX). AM 62 fol.
was probably written in Skagafjörður around or shortly after 1375.
Arni Magnússon obtained this manuscript from Skálholt with the ex-
ception of one gathering that came from elsewhere; its history can be de-
duced from personal names etc. written on two blank pages, ff. 32v-33r,
as well as from other sources. Around 1450 the book was in Eyjafjörður,
where the lögmaður Vigfús Erlendsson (d. 1521) obtained it, probably by
inheritance, subsequently taking it south with him to Hlíðarendi in
Fljótshlíð. His son was the lögmaður Páll Vigfússon (1511-1570), his
daughter Anna á Stóruborg, and her son Magnús Hjaltason who presen-
ted Bishop Oddur Einarsson in Skálholt with ‘Olafs sögur lasnar’.* It
seems plausible that AM 62 fol. is what is now left of that book.
GKS 1005 fol., Flateyjarbók (D2), is the largest vellum codex preserved
from the Icelandic Middle Ages. It originally consisted of 202 leaves mea-
suring 42-42.2 x 29-29.5 cm, with a total of 26 gatherings made up with
few exceptions of four bifolia. The first gathering has only three leaves
and was probably prefixed to the codex when otherwise complete; the
ninth gathering has nine leaves, of which the seventh is a singleton while
the rest are regular bifolia; the twenty-fourth gathering has three bifolia to
which a single leaf has afterwards been added. Eighty or ninety years after
the codex proper had been written the then owner inserted three additional
gatherings, containing 23 leaves in all, after the twenty-fourth original
gathering.