Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Qupperneq 215
THE L RECENSION
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tive prefix, the former more frequently. The svarabhakti is written in
‘sialfur’ 69vb30 and various spellings with abbreviated ur endings in-
dicate its presence.
(vi) y is regularly unrounded to i in forms of þykkja, but retained in
‘fyr’, ‘fyrer’, ‘fyRe’. There are several instances of (y) in forms of
mikill: ‘mykill’, ‘mykin’, ‘myckla’, beside e.g. ‘mikit’, ‘mikin’,
‘mikla’, ‘mikillar’, ‘miklu’; and always (i) in the name Miklagarðr.
The English name Westminster appears as ‘Uestmust’ 69va21, ‘Uest-
myst’ 69rbl8.
(vii) (æ> is used alongside less frequent (e) and (?) to represent *
and older œ. Exx. of (e> forms are ‘hlea’ 69va30, ‘uentu’ 70vb20,
‘n^stu’ 69va3, ‘mgtte’ 71ral0, ‘st^rstu’ 70rb2, ‘d§gra’ 71ra26.
(viii) ö ({>, 0) is most often written (o) or (ö), occasionally (au), e.g.
‘ðnguan’ 70ral9, ‘höndina’ 70ra32, ‘sögn’ 70rb8, ‘höfdu’ 70vbl2;
‘baurduz’ 70rb36, ‘Maurukaara’ 70rb34, ‘aufundsamt’ 70va29,
‘Haurda-’ 70va40, ‘forlaugh’ 71r8. Note ‘er.’ with a macron = ‘erind-
um’ (or ‘erendum’) 70rb5. The verb form is ‘þreyngia’ 70rbl3. The
pret. of snúa is in ‘sner-’, e.g. 69rb3, 69va30-31. The breaking and
mutation product is written (io), e.g. ‘miog’ 70va29, ‘fiolda’ 69rb24.
(ix) Diphthongs au, ei, ey are normally written (au>, (ei>, (ey). The
ligature (a/) occurs once in ‘a/str’ 70vb22, presumably a space-saver
since it is in the last word but one in the line. ei becomes ey in ‘kueykt-
uz’ 69val7. Two forms of numeral sjau are ‘sio’ 69va29,40 ‘seu’
69vb3. At first sight they may recall the spellings in early texts which
have roused the interest of Norwegian philologists and given rise to
sjó, sjú entries in dictionaries.41 They cannot be archaic relics in Ját-
varðar saga because it has been demonstrated that, although the ulti-
40 The word has been furbished, accurately it seems; the final (o) is certainly original.
41 See Fritzner and Fritzner IV; Seip, Sprákhistorie, 144. The texts are Elucidarius,
Erasmus saga, Veraldar saga and Ágrip, all of acknowledged twelfth-century origin.
Icelandic editors of the last two emend ‘siu’ to ‘siau’: Jakob Benediktsson, Veraldar
saga (1944), 11/13, reads ‘si<a>u’; Finnur Jónsson, Ágrip, 1929, 30/4, and Bjarni Ein-
arsson, íf. 29 (1985), 29/2 read ‘sjau’ without comment; Driscoll, Ágrip (1995), 40,
reads 'Sjp’ (phonological justification for this is not easy to see). Jón Sigurðsson, in
Annaler for nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie, 1852, 18, 20, prints these Játvarðar
saga instances as ‘sjö’ and ‘seu’ (this with a footnote, saaledes); Guðbrandur Vigfús-
son, in Icelandic Sagas I (1887), 391, 392, prints them as ‘Sjau’ and ‘seau’ (this with
‘seu’ quoted in a footnote as the manuscript form).