Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.1997, Qupperneq 136

CXXXIV
unanswered questions2. It was probably written after c. 1633, and its Icelandic
texts were probably copied from S7/580. It suffered loss of leaves, and da-
mage by water. Damaged leaves were made good by Páll Hallsson, probably
in Seefeldt’s library at Ringsted in the period 1653-8. It was taken to Sweden
probably by Coijet in 1658.
Mírmanns saga is on ff. 97-132r8. Near the bottom of f. 114r the text stops
in mid-sentence, and asterisks by the scribe indicate that the exemplar was de-
ficient at this point. Probably a leaf was wanting in the exemplar; the amount
of the saga missing would correspond to one leaf of the size seen in S7/580.
The beginning of the saga is missing in S17 because of loss of leaves from
the manuscript. The basis for calculating how many leaves is not very good,
but if the text was fairly like the A-text, it will have filled three leaves more or
less. As the amount of text missing from the end of Qrvar-Odds saga in the
same lacuna can be calculated as 28 leaves with some confidence (since the
exemplar still exists), the lacuna probably amounted to 31 written leaves.
Since the gatherings before and after the lacuna are intact, and provided that
there never was any other text between Qrvar-Odds saga and Mírmanns
saga, it can be assumed that what has been lost is four gatherings of eight
leaves (apparently with some blank space between the two sagas though this
is not found elsewhere in the manuscript in the middle of a gathering).
The title of the saga on f. 97 has been added in a different hand after the
loss of the beginning of the saga. It reads ‘Mírmantz Sivgu fragm.’ A new
paragraph is started at times, but there is no division into chapters, a feature
probably repeated from the exemplar, since in other sagas the scribe of S17
has reproduced most but not all of the chapter divisions of S7. That the exem-
plar might have no chapter divisions can be seen from Konráðs saga in S7.
How good a copy of its exemplar S17 is likely to have been in Mírmanns
saga may be assessed by means of a comparison of S17 with S7 in other
sagas. Detter 1891, xxm-xxiv, with regard to Hrólfs saga Gautrekssonar,
when stating that S17 is a copy of S7, but not addressing precisely this ques-
tion of how good a copy, says that whereas S17 otherwise agrees practically
word-for-word with S7, it departs markedly from it where a line has been lost
or has become difficult to read through trimming of the top edge of the leaf.
He gives three illuminating examples of the latter. Jensen 1983, ccxxi, using
spot checks, finds the scribe of S17 a fairly accurate copyist, though hardly so
painstaking as Jón Erlendsson. Small changes are more frequent, but larger
alterations are almost exclusively confined to places where S7 is illegible or
2 Ólafur Halldórsson and Stefán Karlsson have pointed out to me that the hands most like that
in S17 are those of certain people who were at Skálholt, or had been in their younger days. It is
likely that the same is true of the writer of S17.