Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Page 44
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INTRODUCTION
E. F. Halvorsen did not find Tveitane’s arguments convincing (Maal
og Minne 1969, 4-6), and Stefán Karlsson has dismissed them (Skírnir
143, 234-35). Halvorsen thought wider considerations should be taken
into account in discussing norwegianisms in Icelandic manuscripts,
especially the fact that Iceland was peripheral in relation to Norway
and that on a priori grounds a norwegianising tendency in an Icelander
would be much more likely than the reverse tendency in a Norwegian.
Stefán Karlsson subsequently published a valuable review of the theo-
retical possibilities and persuasively extended his demonstration of
fourteenth-century Icelandic book-production for a Norwegian market
(Maal og Minne 1978, 87-101; 1979, 1-17; the two reprinted in Staf-
krókar, 173-205).
The possibilities in the case of 221 are perhaps too many to allow a
certain decision. The norwegianisms in it appear more prominently
represented than in other Icelandic manuscripts probably meant for
export, but in sum they cannot be paralleled in any single Norwegian
source or speech-region. The scribe may have been affected by years
of work in Norway. It may however be safely assumed that he wrote
221 in Iceland and certainly derived his Jóns saga and Augustinus
saga from an Icelandic exemplar. By the time he undertook the rubrics
in AM 47 fol. he must have had some seniority in the scriptorium. In
47 we can compare his work with guide-titles written for him to fol-
low and with text in the body of the narrative. Stefán Karlsson (EIM
VII, 58) says of his rubrics that “we find repeated this scribe’s paleo-
graphic and orthographic peculiarities, as they are known to us from
221, including some that are specifically Icelandic.” Some of the other
peculiarities may also seem specifically Norwegian, but more impor-
tant than the scribe’s nationality is the fact that he appears as an expe-
rienced professional with marked habits, perhaps idiosyncrasies, of
his own. In view of this, we need hardly expect to find clues in his
Jóns saga text likely to indicate the date of a remoter exemplar. Thus,
for example, the distinction between q and 0 and between œ and æ is
the scribe’s personal practice, as is also the tendency to follow specif-
ic rules in the use of <k> and <c), for both these are features of the
Augustinus saga text and the titles in 47 as well as of Jóns saga. Latin
<d> is found in ‘Benedictus’ 3ral9 (42/8) and ‘grandaði’ 3rb3 (42/21),
but also in ‘predican’ in Augustinus saga, 5vb28 (Hms. I, 152/8),
though not in Latin ‘occidit’ two words later. There is a single instance