Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Síða 291
THE H RECENSION
249*
spellings occur in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts; see
e.g. p. 167*, where it is noted that Hand 4 of Stock. 5 writes both ‘hietu’
and ‘heitu’; ÓHJH, 1010 (Bergsbók Hand B); ÓTrEA III, lx (sporadic
in AM 53 fol. Hand IV), cxcix (common in AM 325 VIII 2 a 4to). It
may seem odd that neither Þorleifur Jónsson nor Jón Pálsson saw fit to
make sense of the reading. Another probable instance of (ei) for é/ie in
their exemplar is in ‘þeir’ for þier/þér in Gþ (L 15/31 t.n.).
Some other noteworthy forms that must have been in the exemplar
can only be more vaguely defined as late medieval or early modem, in-
cluding one or two that are said to be unattested before the sixteenth
century. They are:
(a) Replacement of mega constructions by geta + past. part. construc-
tions (see VIII 3 above).
(b) The collocation áðurfyrr at 36/32. The files of AMOrdbog have
two similar instances of this pleonasm (familiar of course from mod-
em Icelandic): Bragða-Mágus saga (1858), 169/23, ‘í þat hásæti, sem
áðr hafði fyrr í setit Karl keisari’; and Reykjahólabók, I 204/9, ‘hann
þottezt siaa þar nockvt nybreythne er hann saa ecki adr fyrre vmm
quelldet’. The former is from AM 152 fol., dated 1500-25 (it is also in
the seventeenth-century AM 590 a 4to), the latter from Stock. perg.
fol. nr 3, dated c. 1530-40. Reykjahólabók has in fact a few more exx.:
see I 7/28, II 146/27, 232/9, 382/5, 407/31-32 (all with ‘adr fyr(r)e’)'.
(The third ex. in the AMOrdbog files is in Sverris saga, 31/33-34,
from AM 327 4to, dated c. 1300, ‘þeim monnuM var nu minna um at-
socn við Helga er aðr hofðu freistað fyR’; but here we can easily justi-
fy giving áðr the sense of “already” - “those men ... who had already
tried earlier”.)
(c) The adjectival use of hvað in ‘huad elldurinn’ Gþ (L 12/23 t.n.)
and hvaða in ‘huada Okyrleik’ (‘-leika’ H2) 36/19; cf. Um ísl. orðmynd-
ir, 102; Jón Helgason, Málið, 128; Bandle, 367-68.
(d) Adverbial use of nokkut is found comparatively early, cf. Fritzner,
s.v., ísl. orðmyndir, 49, but its use instead of a dative with a compara-
tive or equivalent, 31/23, appears to be a later and less common extensi-
on. (The dat. form was of course commonly replaced by the acc. in the
course of the middle ages in mainland Scandinavian.) It is, for example,
infrequent in Bjöm Þorleifsson’s Reykjahólabók, where he usually writes
‘nockvrv seirnna’ but once ‘Nockvt so seima’ (I 58/9), and has only
very rare other instances: ‘nockvt minna’, I 306/16, and ‘Nockvt efter