Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Side 159
THE S RECENSION
117*
Derivation and relations of the Group B texts.
B2a is a copy of B2 and B4a a copy of B4, but none of the texts B1'5 can
be a copy of any of the others. They must all go back either to Ami
Magnússon’s lost copy (*AM) of S2 or to 391, Gísli Einarsson’s copy
of *AM, since they all have readings typical of the state of this text af-
ter Ami Magnússon had revised Gísli’s work and before he introduced
matter from 392 (H2) in it. Words supplied in brackets in 391, whether
copied as such by Gísli or added in this way by Arni Magnússon, are
variously treated. B' and B5 ignore them; B2 and B3 retain S 10/5
‘(bein)’ as a solitary ex.; while B4 has several instances, S 7/31
‘(Guds)’, 7/87 ‘(Erkibiskup)’, 7/118 ‘(Jön biskup)’, 8/91 ‘(hann)’, 10/5
‘(bein)’, 14/4 ‘(med)’.
Choice between derivation from *AM or from 391 itself depends on
weighing probabilities. Marginal dates in 391 are entered by Ami
Magnússon. If they had been in *AM, they would have been copied by
Gísli Einarsson. There is no sign of them in B1"5. There are one or two
isolated spellings that appear to take us back to a stage before Arni
Magnússon revised Gísli’s copy in 391. Thus, at S 2/46 ‘reyndiz’ Gísli
wrote the first syllable ‘re’ followed by three minims, presumably giv-
ing ‘reindiz’. Arni Magnússon corrected the first minim to ‘y’. B1
reads ‘Remdist’, B2 has ‘Reindest’, with comparable forms in B3, B4
and B5. At S 9/5 ‘mælir’ was written ‘mælis’ by Gísli. Ami Magnús-
son corrected the ‘s’ to ‘r’. In B5 the form is ‘mælis’, while B1 has
‘mælizt’, with related forms in B2, B3 and B4. The spellings, in B1 in
the first case, in B5 in the second, look like relics of inadvertencies in
*AM which had been faithfully followed by Gísli. It seems not unlike-
ly that the marginal ‘post obitum’ notes in B2 and B3 go back to Árni
Magnússon, but they are not in 391. The latter was written in Copen-
hagen at some time in 1688 or ’89 and apparently forthwith revised by
Árni Magnússon. An otherwise unknown copy of it could conceivably
have been made there and carried to Iceland in time for a derivative of
it to be the exemplar for B1, written for Magnús Jónsson í Vigur in
1692. We know, on the other hand, that Árni Magnússon gave his own
transcript to Þórður Jónsson who visited Iceland in the summer of
1691. As will appear below, B1 represents not a first- but a second-
generation copy: the interval is short, but not impossibly short.
Shared deviations demonstrate a common origin for B1"5, e.g. (S2