Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Page 145
THE S RECENSION
103*
Aðils, Oddur Sigurðsson; Jón Ólafsson’s early biography, written c.
1760, is in Merkir íslendingar V, 1-35). He died in 1741. What became
of his copy of Jóns saga in Arni Magnússon’s hand is not known.
Árni Magnússon’s other slip contains a note saying that Gísli
Einarsson’s copy is now (1712) on loan with sr. Jón Halldórsson in
Hítardalur. This has been cancelled and a note added to say that it
came back to Ámi Magnússon in Copenhagen in 1724: ‘Eg hafdi lied
þad Sr Jone 1712 i Septembri, adr fra Islandi för.’ (At the same time sr.
Jón returned the Porláks saga copy in AM 387 4to which he had bor-
rowed from Ámi Magnússon in 1711; AMKat. I, 600.) Concerning a
slip with a list of words in Árni Magnússon’s hand which originally
went with 391, see under AM 393 4to above.
There is evidence that a copy of 391 was made while it was in Ice-
land (see below on Lbs. 839 4to and TCD 1028), and since at least one
of Árni Magnússon’s marginalia virtually destroyed by trimming
could then be read, or misread, the manuscript was not in its present
state at the time. This accords with Jón Ólafsson’s 1730 catalogue in
AM 456 fol., where it is noted as unbound.
The manuscript is of 66 fols. (not 65 as in AMKat. I, 601 - the nine-
teenth-century pencil foliation missed a leaf between those now num-
bered 51 and 52), and fols. 1-35 containing Gísli Einarsson’s copy of
Jóns saga were paginated 1-70 by Ámi Magnússon. The rest of the
volume is unpaginated. Fol. 36 is blank, fol. 37 consists of two leaves
stuck together (the second with some writing on it but concealed by
scribbling before being pasted to the first), the recto blank but with the
supplementary material from 392 (see pp. 217*-19*) beginning on the
verso in a different hand. On fol. 22v there is a pencil mark in the text
and a marginal note, ‘byrj. 221’, and another on fol. 29r, ‘v. 2 bl. í
221’, doubtless made in connection with the preparation of the Bps.
edition. It may be noted that a few top lines in Gísli Einarsson’s copy
and marginal notes both there and in the supplementary part suffered
from trimming when they were finally put in a binding.
The text by Gísli Einarsson has undergone two sets of correction by
Árni Magnússon. First he appears to have read the text against his own
copy, which served as Gísli’s exemplar. In the main text and margins
he introduced emendations and supplied a number of words lacking in
S2 and some dates. Some of the words supplied by him are in brackets,
as are also some words in Gísli’s copy; we may assume that these lat-
ter words had been written thus in Árni Magnússon’s own transcript.