Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Page 221
THE L RECENSION
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stances it is not surprising that these extant texts offer no firm clues to
the dates of their immediate or remoter exemplars. Although these
scribes were bound by certain, not identical, conventions, they appear
to have enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in the exercise of their
craft.
We can discount the possibility of Norwegian transmission of any
of these texts, and the comparatively few norwegianisms that can be
detected - absence of w-mutation in some nouns and verbs, loss of ini-
tial h-, y in forms of mikill, ‘man’ and ‘mandi’ forms in the auxiliary
munu, með found sometimes where við would be expected - must be
attributed to a generalised influence, amply apparent in the Icelandic
of the early and mid fourteenth century.
Among codexes that can be counted from, say, the same twenty
years as Stock. 5 are a few that can be firmly allocated. AM 61 fol., for
example, and the other manuscripts associated with it are thought to
have originated in the middle west of Iceland (Helgafell), AM 66 fol.
(Hulda) in the middle north, AM 351 fol. in Skálholt. The two other
extant manuscripts in Hand 1 of Stock. 5 are also assigned to the mid-
west of the country, and there is little in the scribe’s orthography, com-
pared with that of AM 61 fol., to disturb this finding. The practices of
Hands 2, 3 and 4 point to a writing-master who in some directions was
prepared to countenance a more relaxed set of rules than those applied
in the education of Hand 1. Some of their practices are not so easy to
match in any large fashion and if observed in circumstances other than
those established by the known “extemal” factors might suggest a date
closer to the end of the fourteenth century than to its middle years.
That might seem particularly the case with Hand 5 who had evidently
learnt in a different school, and one might willingly count his copy of
Játvarðar saga an addition made some time after the rest of the codex
was written in the 1360s.45 His different training does not preclude the
possibility that he belonged to the same community of scribes as those
responsible for the rest of the copying; and we may bear in mind that,
just as Hand 3 sat in a scriptorium where he could be twice visited, at
an interval of one or two days, by an expert writer of the Helgafell
45 Kálund, Pal. Atlas, N.S., xiii, noted that Játvarðar saga in Stock. perg. fol. nr 5 was
in a “særlig hánd” and dated it to c. 1400.