Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.1997, Qupperneq 140
CXXXVIII
the saga; and in fact investigation of the text in S47 suggests that JV used only
two of these manuscripts, S6 for a substantial part at the beginning of the saga
(about one-third), and OS for the end (one-fifth or less), and that for a large
part in the middle and second half of the saga he used a manuscript otherwise
unknown to us.
For that part of the saga which was copied from S6, S47 is secondary, but
for the remainder it is primary and is printed in this edition as text D.
JV is believed to have used S6 on more than one occasion; thus Konráðs
saga in Papp. fol. nr 46, handed in on 18 September 1690, is thought to be di-
rectly copied from S6 (Zitzelsberger 1981, 162-3, 165-6), and the same ap-
plies to part of ívens saga (Blaisdell 1979b, xc xci). When the text of Mír-
manns saga in S47 is compared with that in S6 (= A'), the differences that are
found all look as if they are or could be innovations by JV.
Not all the opening words of the saga in S6 can be read now (see the A text
and commentary). S47 has ‘A Dpgumm Clemen-1 tis Papa i Röma | Borg hins
siptta | med [+ þ cancelled] þui Nafni | var eim ágiætur köngur’ etc. It does
not fit the spaces and the traces of letters in S6, but it is a good attempt. (There
is no justification in the manuscript however for the addition of a word be-
tween ‘var’ and ‘ágiætur’, and the addition of ‘eim’ as an indefinite article is
typical of JV.)
Other parts of the first page in S6 are troublesome too. The difficult ‘er
[he]t Hirena’ A l4 appears as ‘hardla gpfuga’. A space is left in S47 (as it is
also in another copy of S6, namely 179) for the partly effaced name ‘Megin-
za’ l7. The condition of the manuscript may also have contributed to the omis-
sion of ‘enn’ l10, ‘madr’ in ‘kuongadr madr’ l12 and ‘þa’ l15, all of which oc-
cur at the damaged inner margin. There is less justification in the manuscript,
however, for copying ‘sigradi’ (abbreviated sigradi) l19 as ‘sagdi’, and
correcting the error by adding ‘og sigradi’ further on, or for substituting
‘klerkana’ for ‘konga ok klerka’ in the same clause (though it is otherwise a
sensible enough change). But then, at the end of this sentence, at ‘hana’ l20,
the copy stops in S47. The rest of p. 3 and the top half of p. 4 are blank, and
the copy resumes with chapter 2. It seems that JV gave up on the last nine
manuscript lines of chapter 1 in S6, though they are no worse than the part he
had already copied.
Elsewhere the differences between S6 and S47 are in accordance with what
has been found in other copies made by JV (see, for example, Blaisdell
1979a; Sanders 1979, note 17; Zitzelsberger 1981, note 34). Examples will be
given here for the most part from chapters 1-2.
There are some omissions: lein<g)zstum l7 (in the difficult opening part),
sem2 l17, bratt 216 (‘lidr nu bratt’ is changed to ‘nu leid’), hinn 222, ox ok 223,
þegar 229, myklo 245 (partly trimmed off in S6), godir 262, svo2 268. At 220 the