Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.1997, Side 25

XXIII
examination of the manuscript under various conditions. It has been impracti-
cable to indicate every instance where part of a letter is illegible. Conjectured
letters have been enclosed in square brackets.
AM 179, fol. (=A2)
AM 179 fol. contains twelve sagas, or parts of them: Eiríks saga víðfQrla,
Konráðs saga, Bevers saga, Ivens saga, Parcevals saga, Valvens þáttr, Mír-
manns saga, Clárus saga, Pjalar Jóns saga, Flóvents saga, Elís saga ok
Rósamundu and MQttuls saga. All of these sagas are also to be found in S6
except the first, and there is evidence that that too was in S6 at one time. Con-
sequently most of the works referred to in the description of S6 above (p.xvi)
can also be consulted with regard to 179; for Eiríks saga see Jensen 1983, and
for the make-up of the manuscript Slay 1991.
It is the general opinion, based on study of the texts, that 179 as a whole is
a copy of S6, even a direct copy of it, and that it reproduces the whole of S6
as it was in the seventeenth century, except for Amícus saga. This presumably
was omitted in the copying because it had already been reduced to a fragment
which lacked the beginning and was extensively illegible.
179 has 222 leaves, two of which are not original. F. 22, containing the be-
ginning of Bevers saga, is a seventeenth-century substitute and is written in a
different hand (if not two); presumably the original leaf had become badly da-
maged. F. 209 is a seventeenth-century addition; written in yet another hand,
it supplies some text of Elís saga which had not been available when 179 was
written and for which space had been left (with the marginal note on f. 208r
‘hier vanntar heillt blad j skinna skridduna’).
The manuscript has suffered the loss of many leaves in a lacuna after f.
159. At some stage it was exposed to damp, which affected the margins of
many pages and caused some loss of words or letters, and caused many bi-
folia to split into separate leaves. Conservation and rebinding in 1963-6 have
halted the damage and made the manuscript readily usable again. Notes were
made as a matter of routine before this work began (in this instance by Agne-
te Loth), recording which leaves were then single and which conjugate.
The notes about conjugate leaves and the presence of gathering catchwords
make it possible to determine the gatherings (which were normally of ten
leaves), and the reconstruction shows, among other things, that although the
manuscript now begins with Eiríks saga, this was not the case originally, as f.
1 has a catchword on its verso and must have been the last leaf of a gathering.
Further, with the reservation that the reconstruction partly depends on conjec-
ture about the lacuna after f. 159, continuity or discontinuity of text across
gathering boundaries suggests that the manuscript was in four booklets: