Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Side 232
190*
INTRODU CTION
rum generale sustentare lege tenebantur (sem þi'ngfarar kaupi attu
ad giegna) in qvadrante orientali 700 fuere, in Australi Mille, in oc-
cidentali nongenti, in Boreali MCC:
This too is derived from fol. *19 of AM 371 4to, cf. Hb., 146/11-15.
Bartholin died in November 1690 and Ami Magnússon ceased to
belong to the Bartholin household in the spring of 1691. His collection
of materials remained with Bartholin’s estate. Arni necessarily made
his acquaintance with the Hb. fragments while in Bartholin’s employ-
ment, 1684-90, and of course after he had made, or perhaps while he
was making, his excerpts from Jóns saga. (We should remember, too,
that fol. * 19 was not among the Hb. remnants he got either after 1694
or in 1702.) We can come a little closer by taking note of yet another
marginal entry, against the passage from Jóns saga on p. 44 of
Bartholin, vol. XII (see above): ‘hæc correctiora vide in Historiá ipsa’.
Here Arni is evidently not referring to the copy derived from AM 205
fol. from which he had made his excerpts, nor to AM 210 fol. (itself a
copy of 205), which probably came into his hands before 1692, though
precisely when is uncertain (see pp. 193*-94* below). The only text
(cf. S 8/87-91) that fits the bill is then AM 234 fol., which Árni later
recorded had come to Bartholin on loan from Bishop Þórður Þorláks-
son ‘nockrum árum’ before Bartholin’s death (see pp. 11*-12*), but
which we know was despatched from Iceland in the autumn of 1687
(see p. 15*). Ámi was in Iceland 1685-86, and although he probably
set eyes on 234 at Skálholt, he presumably only got to know it well in
the winter of 1687 and the following year. He read it with lexico-
graphical interest (see p. 12*, n. 1) and made a transcript of Jóns saga
(now lost), which was copied in turn by Gísli Einarsson, most likely in
1688 (see p. 102*). Árni’s marginal reference to the better text ‘in Hi-
storiá ipsa’ must belong to this period.
Árni Magnússon’s immediate source in Bartholin, vol. XII, was an
inferior copy derived from 205. The only Jóns saga copy known to
have been in Copenhagen in Árni’s first years in Bartholin’s employ-
ment was the volume put together by sr. Þorsteinn Björnsson which
made part of Resen’s collection. As seen earlier (p. 186*), there is
good reason to believe that that copy was derived directly from 205,
and it may be certainly identified as Árni’s source. Thanks to the re-
search of Már Jónsson, it can be demonstrated that many of the items