Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Side 310
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INTRODUCTION
lowed a text of the L recension with the error found in L1 2/4-5: ‘er
liðin vorv fra falli hins heilagha Olaafus konungs tuttughu ok þriu aar’.
3. Arngrímur Jónsson made summary use of a Jóns saga text in Brevis
commentarius, published in 1593, and slightly more extensive use in
Crymogæa, published in 1609; see Bibl. Arn. IX, 51/17-26, X 94/33-
96/3. In his notes on these passages (Bibl. Arn. XII, 163, 304) Jakob
Benediktsson concluded that Amgrímur had a text of either the S or
the H recension, and in his introduction refers to it as probably of the
H kind, and again as “probably the original of the two extant paper
manuscripts”, sc. H1 and H2 (Bibl. Am. XII, 98, 150). If Amgrímur
had an H text, however, it could not have been the exemplar followed
in these H manuscripts. At Bibl. Am. X, 95/17-19 Crymogæa has
“Cuius, Ogmundianæ nempe ædis, vestigia Cathedra Holensis etiam-
num retinet, subinde á variis, prout usus postularat, refecta”, a sen-
tence which answers to S 8/12-14 but which is not in H (cf. H 18/8-9).
The Crymogæa text at Bibl. Arn. X, 95/34-35 and 95/36-96/1 clearly
depends on S 8/170-176 and S ch. 13, but these passages fall in the
large lacuna in the exemplar of H' and H2 (it begins S 8/157). On this
patchy evidence it appears most likely that Amgrímur worked from a
copy of the S recension, but we cannot entirely rule out the possibility
that he had a fuller and better H text than we have, coinciding here
with S (as, of course, much of the H text does). Supposing he had, it
might be tempting to speculate that he drew from it the otherwise un-
attested statement:
Saxa verö hic Episcopus in vicino monte versus Euronotum sito ef-
fodi primus curavit, lateres referentia tum colore rubeo, tum mate-
ria quoque sectili. Vnde altare templi et gradus juxta altare fieri
fecit. Vnde etiam successu temporis totum ædis pavimentum con-
stratum est.
As Jakob Benediktsson surmises, there may well be confusion with
Bishop Auðun rauði (cf. Laurentius saga, 69), but Amgrímur seems at
some pains to point a distinction between stages in the use of the stone
(“primus”, “successu temporis”). If it was “a tradition at Hólar” to as-
sociate Jón helgi with an altar and steps made of stone from Raftahlíð,
it might possibly have found record in a text of the H recension of