Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.1997, Síða 153
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sharply at a single point. A tall ‘v’, as large as a capital, normal initially in
words at the beginning of the text, is replaced by a smaller one. ‘0’ is replaced
by ‘ö’, and after some pages of ambiguity over the significance of ‘ö’, two dots
over a vowel as a sign of length (‘a’, ‘ö’ and ‘ii’) are replaced by a single acute
accent (‘á’ etc); some words already written were then altered on several
pages. The new forms are maintained in the manuscripts Halldór Jónsson
wrote later; other small changes can also be seen in them, and greater neatness.
Capital letters and full stops have been supplied in the transcription to mark
the beginnings and ends of sentences. Capitals are common in the manuscript,
but have not been reproduced except at the beginnings of sentences and in
names. Manuscript punctuation has been transcribed as commas or full stops
according to context. Commas have rarely been supplied, but manuscript
commas have been omitted in c. 50 instances. The attempt has been made to
follow manuscript spacing of compound words, but consistency was difficult.
The F-text is much shorter than any of the other versions of the saga, and it
may be derived from a form of the older Mírmants rímur, which originated in
the sixteenth century and are preserved in whole or in part in seven manu-
scripts. The rímur have not been printed, and not much has been published
about them, but there is some information in Björn K. Þórólfsson (1934) and
Finnur Sigmundsson (1966). The Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen has
transcripts of two of the texts, made by Ögmundur Helgason; references to
the rímur in the present book are to the transcript of Lbs 989 4to.
A full treatment of the relation between the F-text and the rímur would be
disproportionate in the present book, and a few illustrations of their agree-
ment with each other must suffice. First, the twelve chapters in F correspond
essentially to the twelve rímur of Mírmants rímur. The correspondence is not
exact in four places: chapters 4, 7, 10 and 11 begin slightly early, with matter
from the end of the previous ríma. But the divisions come in essentially the
same places, compared with the chapter divisions in the other versions. Se-
condly, there are points of agreement between F and the rímur in the handling
of the text. For example:
1. At the beginning of the saga (A 12'6), F and the rímur have no refer-
ence to king HlQðvir and his wife, or the heathendom north of the Alps,
and the earl is named Geirmann, not Hermann. Only A is available for
comparison in this part of the saga.
2. In the discussion about Mírmann’s further education, it is the father
in F (l81) and the rímur (I 59-60), not the mother as in A (262'3) and C
(13-14), who names HlQðvir as the person to whom Mírmann should be
sent.