Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Page 289
THE H RECENSION
247*
25. Particle ‘ed’ is very rare. The concessive conj. appears either as
‘þo ad’ or as ‘þott’ (VII 7).
26. Indicative endings in first and second pl. pres. subj. are usual,
‘vier sieum’ and so on, but most often ‘þeir sie’ (VII 8 (ii)).
27. Jón Pálsson presumably introduces the form ‘þuodu’, Bysk.s.,
352/109:13; according to Bandle, 406, it appears to be first attested
in Guðbrandsbiblía (VII 8 (iii)).
28. Pret. inf. mundu and mundi seem equally common (VII 8 (vii)).
X. The exemplar of H1 and H2.
1. Physical state. The exemplar followed in H1 and H2 was defective at
the beginning and end: the text started with the last three words of a
sentence towards the conclusion of ch. 1 of the S text and finished in
mid-sentence soon after the start of the appended Sæmundar þáttr (from
an L text). The H version also lacks text corresponding to S 1/33-47 (or
L 4/1-16) and to S 8/157-15/19 (or L 28/5-35/6), and it may be assumed
that these passages did not exist in the exemplar either.
At the beginning text answering to 23 lines in H' is missing, if the ex-
emplar began like S2 with no Prologue, but to 50 lines if the Prologue
known from L1 was included. Similarly, the amount missing at the end
answers to 48 lines in H1. Either a single well-filled page has been lost
at beginning and end or, as may seem more likely, the missing text was
on two pages in each case, so the exemplar had lost a single leaf at start
and finish. That being so, we cannot tell whether the recto of the first
lost leaf contained the Prologue or some other text or none at all. Cal-
culating from the correspondence between the missing start and end
and the intervening extant text in the H manuscripts, we get a neat
answer: the exemplar (which did not contain the matter from chs. 1 and
8-15 noted as missing) was either on 22 folios or 44. Leaves are more
likely to be lost if they are outermost. The inference, though obviously
far from certain, would be that the manuscript copied in H' and H2 was
not in large format, probably not bound with other items, possibly not
in permanent covers at all.
We can, of course, only guess at the format of the exemplar’s exem-
plar. It seems unlikely that the omission of matter corresponding to S
1/33-47 (L 4/1-16) was due to physical damage. (It was perhaps an edi-
tor’s intention to shift this anecdote about Jón as a child abroad with his
parents to give chronological precedence to the following anecdote