Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.2003, Page 311
KNOWLEDGE OF JÓNS SAGA
269*
Jóns saga. But the speculation that Arngrímur had such a text c. 1600
can find no support in the H1 and H2 manuscripts copied at Hólar c.
1630 and 1640. (In AM 220 8vo, cf. p. 207*, Bjöm á Skarðsá did not
associate Bishop Jón with any use of stone in his church at Hólar, and
of course there was no warrant for it in H1, the defective text of Jóns
saga known to him. A later account of Jón helgi in AM 912 4to, fols.
19v-20r (c. 1700), found also in AM 407 4to, fol. 219 (early eigh-
teenth century), and used by sr. Þorsteinn Pétursson (1710-85) in his
BiskupaannáU (1758; autograph in Lbs. 1062 4to), conflates informa-
tion from Björn á Skarðsá and Crymogæa, but appears to show no di-
rect dependence on any form of Jóns saga. As an addition the writer
borrows from Laurentius saga the description of the stone altar at
Hólar, but ascribes the work to Bishop Jón, not Bishop Auðun.)
4. A later seventeenth-century hand introduced some corrections here
and there in the first twenty chapters of H1, pp. 111-25 below, and he
may have been responsible for a few others. They are recorded in the
textual apparatus. Those certainly attributable to this main reviser
were evidently drawn from an S text but not from any manuscript now
identifiable.
5. (i) Jón lærði Guðmundsson (1574-1658) wrote his Samantektir um
skilning á Eddu in 1641. In a passage on the shape-changing of the
æsir he refers to stories of the gods living on into the time of Jón Ög-
mundarson, and goes on to say of Bishop Jón:
hann villdi oc þvi afkoma at eigna þeim fomu Guðum oc Gyðiom
viku daga, sva sem var at kalla (sem nu gera danskir,) Tysdag,
(Odinnz d(ag)) Þorsdag Freyiudag sem i sogu hans er avikit (Eddu-
rit II, 54/8-10).
As Einar G. Pétursson notes (Eddurit I, 348-49), Jón lærði adds ‘Freyiu-
dag', which occurs in no known Jóns saga text. Einar G. Pétursson
thinks this suggests that Jón lærði was quoting from memory. He may
have been, but the addition seems less likely due to faulty memory
than to a desire to offer ‘Freyiudag’ as the one ex. to be found in sup-
port of his opening reference to ‘gyðjur’ on top of the simple ‘goð’ of
Jóns saga. ‘Tysdag’, on the other hand, occurs only in L 25/40-41, and