Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.1981, Page 70

LXVI
tions. 28,18 A reads: med nockra villdarmenn, and nockra is abbre-
viated nocw. BC read: rned 10° (= tíu hundruð) villdarmenn, a
misreading which seems to presuppose precisely the (not very
common) abbreviation in A, although the more ordinary nocra
might conceivably have inspired the error. Another reading diffi-
cult to reconcile with the hypothesis of az’s not being the offspring
of A is 71,25 kappmikill, where the k is preceded by the upper half
of an s in A. Now skapmikill is the correct reading, as can be seen
from Tmsl963 207,28, and the half-finished s suggests that the
reading kappmikill in all three paper MSS originated in A rather
than was copied from its exemplar.
Even though the arguments in favour of az’s having been a
sister MS of A carry greater weight, the text of BC is so inferior to
that of A that there is only very occasionally anything to be
gained from consulting it. It has, however, been considered desir-
able to include in the edition a variant apparatus containing such
variant readings from B and C as may go back to az (cf. above,
p. lxv) and a few corrections of errors in A have been made with
support in BC. This mainly applies to more or less obvious scribal
errors in A and not to such readings as 10,24 i hond þeirra Girkia,
where it is extremely unlikely that the supposedly meaningless
hond in A could be misread for the commonplace her in BC.
The text of Fr is closely related to that of the paper MSS and
in the cases where it is possible to check the readings of a against
Tmsl963, it is evident that when the paper MSS differ from Fr it
is almost invariably the latter which has preserved the original
reading. The possibility of the common ancestor of ABC (ay)
simply being derived from Fr seems however to be excluded by
48,3, where ay reads heita yfermadur sinn (vera sinn yfermadur BC)
eda firer honum, which cannot have been copied from the corre-
sponding text in Fr: heita fyrer honum, since 0 (Tmsl963, 192,8)
has vera yfirmaþur hanns. The explanation could be that Fr and
ay were both copied from a common exemplar where the passage
ran something like this: vera yfirmaðr hans eða heita fyrir honum.
Still, it is a curious coincidence that corresponding to the last
words on Fr lr, where the edge of the leaf is cut away so that three
quarters af a line are missing between eki ueg (o: ekki vœg[iliga\,