Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.10.2003, Side 38
20*
General introduction
recently, however, Rolf Heller has taken the ‘interpolation’ stance,48 while
Peter Hallberg has claimed that the reference is contemporary with the rest
of the saga.49 Both critics put forward statistical linguistic evidence. It may
be worth mentioning that part of the evidence Hallberg uses to support his
late date (well into the latter half of the thirteenth century) is from the IF
edition, which for the most part is Aa/Ak. The present editor, thinking that
this indication of late date might be due to the somewhat revised text found
in A, carried out a comparison of the use of the verbs hitta(sk) and finna(sk)
in W, as Hallberg had done for the saga as a whole. Hallberg’s percentage
of hitta in Eyrbyggja saga is 3.2% (one hitta versus 30 finná). This
compares with 75.8% hitta in Egils saga, 58.3% in Laxdœla saga, 10.7% in
Grettis saga, and only 1.5% in Njáls saga. This editor found that the ratio
of hitta tofinna in Z, the text of which is fairly close to that in ÍF IV, is 2:17
i e 10.5% are hitta. The figures for W alone are 4:11 i e 26.7% hitta. That W
shows up as older than the bulk of Einar Ólafur’s text is of course what one
would expect. The extant leaves of M show one case of hitta and one of
finna, obviously indeterminately. (The other vellums E and G are too short
to be of use for statistical purposes.)
An even more striking item in the last chapter is the presence at the
exhumation of Snorri goði’s bones of Guðný Bpðvarsdóttir, mother of the
three Sturlusons; she is known to have died in 1221. It is her evidence that
the saga quotes regarding the size and appearance of the bones. M and W
remark that she was then ‘hustru (huspreyia W) j Huammi’ (M 52.42; E and
G are not available at that point). M reads: ‘oc sagdi hun suo fra at bein
Snora uéri ecki meiri en medaEmanna bein ecki mikil’; W: ‘... at þat uæri
meðal manz bein mikil’ (sic). Aj and Ak have similar readings, but Z and
Aa, for ‘hun’, read ‘Þorður Sturlu son’. Einar Ól. Sveinsson in a note50 calls
this “markleysa” (nonsensical). Perhaps it is, but such a piece of ‘nonsense’
usually has a cause. If, as is possible, ‘oc sagdi Þorður Sturlu son’ is a
copying error for “ok sagði (hon) Þórði Sturlusyni” (nominative for dative)
the nonsense disappears: the author got his information through Þórðr, who
had got it from his mother. Even if the nominative form were allowed to
stand, the passage would make sense if the author assumed that the reader
would readily understand that Þórðr got the information from his mother,
who has just been mentioned. That Eyrbyggja saga was written in the
neighbourhood of Þórðr Sturluson (d. 1237) is assumed in IF IV.51 If this
48 Heller 1984.
49 Hallberg 1979.
50 Einar Ól. Sveinsson in ÍFIV, p. 183.
51 Einar Ól. Sveinsson in ÍFIV, p. liii.