Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Side 136
94*
INTRODUCTION
(ii) The form ‘brutt’, ‘j bruttv’, is preferred throughout, with rare in-
stances of ‘bvrt’ and ‘brott’; ‘braut’ occurs at e.g. 55ral4, 61va9, and
in ‘brautferd’ 41rbl3.
24. Prep. ór is almost universally written ‘ur’, ‘vr’; ‘ör’ noted rarely,
e.g. 28rb33, 45ra21.
IX. The date of AM 235 fol.
Guðbrandur Vigfússon said that AM 235 fol. was probably written
about 1380 (Bps. I, xxxvii) and subsequently made that dating a little
freer, “circa 1380-1400” (Icelandic Sagas I, 281, n. 1). Unger accepted
the 1380 date (Hms. I, vi) and thought it belonged to the same period
as Stock. perg. fol. nr 2, a codex in fact from about 1425 or a bit later
(EIM IV, 11). Kálund noted its date as c. 1400 (AMKat. I, 196); Magn-
ús Már Lárusson said the same (Saga (1962), 487), while Finnbogi
Guðmundsson reverts to “frá lokum 14. aldar” (íf. XXXIV, cxxix).
AMOrdbog Registre, 436, follows Kálund.
The selective descriptions of Hands A and C offered above appear
to show that the former was a relatively conservative and consistent
writer and the latter a man less disciplined and more innovative. The
straightforward conclusion would be that Hand A was an older man,
probably trained about the middle of the fourteenth century (his chief
concession to changing fashion seems to lie in his generous use of <j»
and Hand C a man who had been trained at a later date and in a differ-
ent school, very likely in another part of the country. In dating the
codex it is obviously his usage which is chiefly relevant. The stumb-
ling block is his idiosyncrasy. He had an ear, as his spellings reflecting
assimilation show, but not much of an eye. His rather numerous
middle voice (st) endings in polysyllabic verbs, for instance, would
point to a late date, but his treatment of <z) and even <zt) endings as
more or less graphic variants of s(s) urges caution. His persistent
‘siolf(-)’ forms and his almost exclusive ‘brutt’ forms are not readily
paralleled. The isolated second person pret. ‘tokzt’ is inadequate evi-
dence of the general change in this case, which is otherwise not ob-
served until after 1500.46 Nor is it possible to deduce the scribe’s ori-
46 Cf. e.g. Stefán Karlsson, Stafkrókar, 39, with refs.