Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.10.2003, Blaðsíða 15

Editor’s preface
The principal aim of the present edition is to provide complete and reliable
transcriptions of the surviving mediaeval vellum manuscripts of Eyrbyggja
saga, all of which are fragmentary.
The task was necessary because the previous scholarly editions of the
saga (that is the editions of Guðbrandur Vigfússon, Hugo Gering and Einar
Ol. Sveinsson), valuable though they all are, relied heavily on a single paper
manuscript. This is AM 448 4to (= Aa), the copy made by Asgeir Jónsson in
Copenhagen in 1686-88. All three editors supplied variant readings from
vellum manuscripts and careful scholars have made use of these, but, on the
whole, what critics have thought of as Eyrbyggja saga has in fact been Aa.
Articles on structure, for example, have sometimes measured the saga by
means of the chapter numbers found in Einar 01. Sveinsson’s edition in
íslenzk fornrit. It is true that there is no great difference between the chapter
divisions of Aa and the vellums, but they are not identical, and of course
chapter numbers as such are not given in any of the vellum manuscripts (nor
in Aa).
In my opinion the class of manuscripts to which Aa belongs (the ‘A
class’) constitutes a revision of the story. If this is correct, the texts
contained in the manuscripts E W M G and printed here represent in their
various ways an earlier form of the saga than has been previously publishéd.
The present edition will place scholarship on Eyrbyggja saga, for purposes
such as the study of its origins, the examination of its verse, its narrative
style and its general outlook vis-á-vis other sagas, on a fresh basis, one
almost certainly closer to the saga’s original form.
My work on this edition has been under way for half a century, following
the suggestion of Professor Bruce Dickins that Eyrbyggja saga might be a
suitable candidate for inclusion in Nelson’s Icelandic Texts series. In 1952 I
visited the University Library in Copenhagen, to which the Herzog August
Library in Wolfenbiittel was so kind as to lend the codex W. This first visit
to Copenhagen was too short for me to copy the text of W, and I am
therefore much indebted to Messrs Ejnar Munksgaard for the early (and
long-term) loan of photographs taken for the facsimile published by them in
Manuscripta Islandica. The appearance of that facsimile rendered the task
of copying less dependent on access to the manuscript itself, and I was able
to complete a draft transcription from it. In 1963 I paid a short visit to
Wolfenbúttel and used the manuscript again, and finally I consulted it in
Wolfenbúttel in 1987 to check some indistinct words and letters.