Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2000, Page 350
CCCXLVIII
in the archetype (*A) . It is not, however, possible to decide whether
*A was identical with *0.
All existing manuscripts go back to *A via numerous intermediaries,
some of which can be established with certainty through variants com-
mon to two or more manuscripts, while others are more difficult to de-
fine. With respect to their textual transmission the manuscripts of the
saga may be divided into two groups: the A group (i.e. ABC'), which
has preserved the original form of the work, and the D group in which
it has been revised (see pp. CCCX ff.).
The striking difference between the text of ABC' (the A group) on
the one hand and that of D1,2,3 (the D group) on the other hand proves
that D', D2, and D3 go back to an archetype that was neither the direct
nor the indirect ancestor of any other extant manuscripts (on D3 see
further pp. CCLXXX f.). This lost manuscript or secondary archetype
is henceforth designated *D.
That *D cannot derive from the common archetype of ABC' appears
from the fact that there are several examples of secondary readings in
ABC' where D12 agree with parallel texts. These common errors in
ABC’ also rule out the possibility that A*D or BC‘*D can have a com-
mon archetype, in spite of the fact that AD1,2 are unique in displaying
some secondary readings that do not occur in BC'.
The circumstance that every individual manuscript has one or two
original readings where all others seem to depart from the original can
probably be partly explained through the books having been written by
professional copyists. These persons doubtless worked at centres of
book production, and we can therefore assume that they would have
copied texts of several of the sagas that had served as sources for the
compiler of OlTr; possibly they also wrote more than one copy of the
saga. It is therefore quite feasible that a scribe occasionally recalled an
expression that was differently worded than in the exemplar he was co-
pying, or that he perhaps looked up other manuscripts. This could for
example explain the relatively numerous cases of correspondence be-
tween A and Laxdœla saga. As far as the original of the D group is con-
cerned, it is quite certain that it was written in a place where there was
a large library. We can therefore assume that the compiler of this redac-
tion compared his exemplar of ÓlTr with parallel sources, even if he
did not otherwise revise it, and that the text in D1,2 is thus occasionally
closer to the original than the corresponding readings in any other wit-
ness. In postulating such sporadic influence of other manuscripts on
the wording of a text that the scribe in principle copied from a single
exemplar, we exclude the possibility of visualising the mutual relati-