Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Side 244
202*
INTRODUCTION
and on the flyleaf at the back. At the end of item 16, fol. 192v, is a note
which says that ‘Prófasturenn Sira Arni Thorsteinsson af Kyrkiubæ a
Blödin med Réttu 1824’.
Three of the names on the inset leaf belong to members of the same
Eyjaförður family. Hallgrímur Gíslason (born 1790), brother of
Þorsteinn á Stokkahlöðum, was farming a Kristnes holding in 1816
(Manntal 1816, 947); after that he was at Syðra-Gil in Hrafnagils-
hreppur but from 1829 onwards lived most of his life as bóndi of
Einarsstaðir in Kræklingahlíð. His son, Arni, born in 1830, was bóndi
at Reistará in Möðruvallasókn in Hörgárdalur until 1871; he died in
1891. His son, Stefán Kristján, born in 1860, became bóndi at Steins-
staðir in Öxnadalur after the death of his matemal grandfather, Stefán
Jónsson, previously bóndi there, who had fostered him; he died in
1940. (I owe most of the above information to the late Einar Bjamason.)
The other names are those of well-known men. Jónatan Þorláksson
(1825-1906) lived at Þórðarstaðir in Fnjóskadalur (Suður-Þingeyj-
arsýsla), “froðleiksmaður og ættvís” (ÍÆ III, 342-43). His manuscript
collection was bought by Landsbókasafn in 1906 (Landsbókasafn ís-
lands 1818-1918, 197-98). Sr. Ámi Þorsteinsson (1754-1829; ÍÆ I,
77-78) was parson of Kirkjubær í Hróarstungu (Norður-Múlasýsla)
from 1791 till his death. The ownership attribution to him on fol. 192v
may refer only to Halldór Davíðsson’s contribution, but possibly to
more. 629 also contains items said there to be written for sr. Ámi, but
these were the work of Jóhannes Árnason; cf. Valla-Ljóts saga, xxxi.
As noted in Hdraskrá I, 554, it is likely that the contents of the vol-
ume originally existed in four or more separate parts. Whether they
were first combined by Hallgrímur Gíslason is hard to say. Jónatan
Þorláksson presumably obtained the book from Stefán Kristján Árna-
son towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Jóns saga in 1573 and the other items in the same unidentified hand
are doubtless more or less contemporary with the texts written by
Þorsteinn Gíslason and Halldór Davíðsson, i.e. from c. 1820-30. It is
natural to assume that the writer lived in the north or north-east of Ice-
land.
The copy of Jóns saga is closely related to that in 629. As well as
new readings of its own, it has all the distinctive errors of 629 noted
on p. 201* above, and it treats the gaps marked by dots in the same
way. 1573 could be a copy of 629, and the few cases where it diverges