Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.12.1960, Blaðsíða 112

SUMMARY
This book is in two main parts:
A: pp. 119—178: Text, taken from the main manuscript, AM
556 a, 4to, ff. 70r—88r, and from the fragment in AM 564 a, 4to, f. 7.
These texts are here printed diplomatically, with all abbreviations
italicised and expanded in accordance with the manuscript’s own
spelling, and also with some notes on the appearance of the manu-
script in special cases, corrections of spelling mistakes, etc. This
edition of the text is intended to replace the edition, excellent for
its time, in »íslendínga sögur, Andet Bind« (Copenhagen 1847), pp.
1—118 and 476—480, in which the text was normalised.
B: A detailed introduction, in which the author gives an account
of all the manuscripts of Harð. In so doing he treats only the mss
556 and 564 in full detail, but gives on pp. 92—94 a short summary
of the result of the investigation which is published in Bibliotheca
Arnamagnæana 23. The rímur about Harð., which are found in mss
in Landsbókasafn, Reykjavík, are briefly mentioned on p. 93 but
the author does not hold that he is able to establish their relation
to mss of the saga, but merely puts forward a conjecture, that
they could have been written on the basis of printed texts.
The main part of the introduction, pp. 15—88, is devoted to ms 556.
A summarised account is given first, pp. 15—16, of the later history
of the ms, as it is known from c. 1550 onwards, with reference to
Jón Helgason, Handritaspjall, pp. 77—79. By means of an identifi-
cation of a name in a margin of the ms, and of some information
derived from Árni Magnússon in AM 122 c, fol., the author has
made some contributions to the history of the ms in the 17th
century.
No conjectures have been made before about the history of the
ms from its origin in c. 1475 to c. 1550. On pp. 16—30 the author
has tried to solve the riddle of the ownership of the ms in this