Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.06.1997, Page 164
IX. SUMMARY
Thirty-four manuscripts are known which contain texts of Mírmanns saga,
complete or incomplete.
There are two substantial medieval manuscripts (S6, 593); they are incom-
plete, but overlap with each other. The earlier one contains approximately the
first two-fifths of the saga, and the later one lacks the beginning. The text of
the earlier one can be continued for the next two-fifths by recourse to seven-
teenth-century manuscripts thought to be copied or derived from it when it
was more complete than it is now, although even then it lacked an ending
(179, 181 g); and it is argued in this edition that the ending of it may be trace-
able in a group of later manuscripts more distantly derived from it (1000, 634,
59, 45). A parallel to the text of the later one is provided for a few sentences
by two fragments of a third medieval manuscript (1230). These texts are
called A and B.
There is a seventeenth-century manuscript (4859) which has the first four-
fifths of text from S6/181 g, and completes it with an ending of unknown ori-
gin. This ending is called E.
Most of the other manuscripts are secondary, and contain the A-text or the
combined A/E-text.
Another seventeenth-century manuscript (S17) contains a text which lacks
the beginning of the saga because of a loss of leaves, and lacks part of the text
in the middle of the saga because of a deficiency in its exemplar (indicated in
S17). It was probably copied from now missing parts of a medieval manu-
script which is still in existence (as Perg 4:o nr 7 and AM 580 4to) and which
is much earlier than the extant medieval manuscripts of Mírmanns saga. This
text is called C.
Another seventeenth-century manuscript (S47) contains a text which is se-
condary in the beginning, for it is a copy of S6, but thereafter seems to have
been copied from two now lost manuscripts. Nothing is known about the first
of these exemplars, and it may not have been very old, but the second, which
provided the ending, was probably ‘Ormur Snorrason’s Book’, which is
thought to have been appreciably earlier than the extant medieval manuscripts
of Mírmanns saga. This text is called D.
The last of the six texts of Mírmanns saga distinguished in this edition is
contained in a nineteenth-century manuscript (152), and a few secondary co-
pies. It may be a prose rendering of a form of the sixteenth-century Mírmants
rímur. This text is called F. There is evidence for a connection between F and
the central part of D, and the rímur mainly agree with D and F where these
two agree with each other against other texts. It is chiefly in this way, and for
its small part in the later literary and social history of Iceland, that F is of