Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Síða 149
THE S RECENSION
107*
222; Agnete Loth, Steffánsfærsla, 40-41; and Mariane Overgaard,
Equus Troianus, 57-58. That Jón was son of Þórður Jónsson of Strand-
sel (see p. 212*) is virtually certain, cf. Agnete Loth, loc. cit.
The Catalogue of Additions cites 4867 as Vol. XI, with No. 35 noted
on fol. 1, of the Banks Collection. Joseph Banks visited Iceland in
1772. According to notes beside the entry of Add. 4857 (the first of the
Banks Icelandic manuscripts in the handwritten catalogue in BL Add.
5015, fol. 11 lr) he donated 31 manuscripts to the British Museum in
December 1773, 38 in January 1778, and 17 in March 1781. The later
acquisitions were those collected on Banks’s behalf, chiefly through
the good offices of Olafur Stefánsson stiftamtmaöur, in the years fol-
lowing his visit. 4867 must have been among those presented to the
Museum in 1778 and 1781, in time for it to appear in Ayscough’s list
in Add. 5015, itself dated 1781. On Banks’s visit and the inheritance
of manuscripts from Magnús í Vigur by Páll Vídalín, then by Bjami
Halldórsson, and their final acquisition by Ólafur Stefánsson, see e.g.
Eiríkr Magnússon, Lilja, xxiii; Halldór Hermannsson, Islandica 18,
15-17; Jón Helgason, Ritgerðakorn og ræðustúfar, 110-11. Jón
Þorkelsson, Arkiv VIII, 203, pointed out however that 4867 is not to
be identified in the records of the Vigur volumes that were in the pos-
session of Páll Vídalín and Bjami Halldórsson: “Hándskriftet er derfor
kommet til Banks ad andre veje” - that may be so, but no other way
has been traced.
On Jóns saga the Catalogue of Additions purveys some misinfor-
mation, that Bishop Jón built a stone church at Hólar and that his relics
were “enshrined” on 14 December 1198, the first perhaps ultimately
derived from Arngrímur Jonsson’s Crymogæa (1609; Bibl. Arn. X, 95;
cf. p. 268* below), the second a confusion between the preliminary
exhumation of the relics in 1198 and the ceremonial enshrinement in
the cathedral on 3 March 1200.
The only marginal note in the Jóns saga copy is beside S 7/77-78
(on Pope Paschalis II), ‘Les Cronicu Johannis Carionis um hanz heilag-
leic’. There is good reason to suppose that this was contributed by Jón
Þórðarson himself. He finished copying the item before Jóns saga in
4867 on 6 January 1692. The next task set him by Magnús í Vigur was
apparently to copy Þórður Sveinsson’s translation of the Danish ver-
sion of Chronica Carionis, printed in Copenhagen in 1595. His copy
of this, now in BL Add. 11153, is dated 24 February 1692 (Cook,