Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Page 300
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INTRODUCTION
miracles that occurred after the first elevation of Bishop Jón’s relics in
December 1198 and those associated with their ceremonial translation
in March 1200, was prepared for presentation at the Althing in June of
this same year, when St Jón’s cult was officially established. Such a
collection, extended by the custodians of the shrine at Hólar with
records of subsequent miracles, naturally provided the basis on which
the relevant parts of our Jóns saga texts were originally built; but if
the editor responsible for the reference in the Guðmundar saga ver-
sion quoted above was thinking primarily of the saga account, he
could easily have said so: in the same way as the author of Páls saga
byskups did, though admittedly as a kind of internal rather than exter-
nal reference, when he wrote of St Þorlák’s translation: ‘og fylgdu
jarteikn(er) þá þegar þar störar sem sagt verdur j sogu hins helga
Thorlaks byskupz’ (Bysk.s., 418/6:39-40). Taking these various fac-
tors into account, it seems that we should countenance the possibility
that the Guðmundar saga editor, some time in the fourteenth century,
had in mind not the Jóns saga in the L recension, which he apparently
knew, but a separate collection of miracles attributed to Jón’s interces-
sion. The original would be at Hólar. Whether it also existed in any or
many copies we do not know.
(iv) In his Guðmundar saga byskups Arngrímr Brandsson (died
1361 or perhaps 1362), abbot of Þingeyrar, wrote of Gunnlaugr Leifs-
son (died 1219), monk of Þingeyrar:
Þessi Gunnlaugr componeraði meðr latínu líf hins sæla Johannis
fyrsta Holensis; váttar hann þat í prologo þess sama verks, at þat
efni tók hann upp í fyrstu fyrir bæn eða boð virðuligs herra
Guðmundar Hólabiskups (Bps. II, 31).
The information can be found in the Prologue (ch. 1) of L, and some
of the vocabulary here might appear to be drawn from this Icelandic
recension: Gunnlaugr ‘er laatinu soguna dicktat hefuir’ L 1/24, ‘prolo-
gus’ 1/1, ‘efni’ 1/29, ‘at bodi ok aa eggian werdligs herra Gudmundar
byskups’ 1/26-27. On the other hand, if, as is possible, the lines in
Arngrím’s saga themselves depend on a Latin text, to find these Ice-
landic terms for latine, prologus, silva or materia, iussu ac hortatu
venerabilis domini (or similar), would not be distinctively out of the
way. But whether Arngrímr thus knew the prologue in Icelandic or in