Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.10.2003, Page 45
The present edition
27*
later developed by Forrest S. Scott.80 It is also one which is warmly in tune
with Robert Kellogg, who concludes: “For who had taught the saga writers
their language and their stories while the monks were teaching them to
write?”81 - the implied answer being “their mothers”.
3. The present edition
It is not the purpose of the present edition to produce a single, re-
constructed version based exclusively on the extant vellums. This would be
a complicated and somewhat hazardous undertaking since all the vellum
manuscripts are fragmentary, and for a considerable stretch of the saga,
approximately six chapters, none of them are available - other than the
readings of the lost parts of M preserved through Þórður Jónsson’s
additions to AM 447 4to. Over this stretch G, which starts at the beginning
of the saga and does not break off until well after W has begun, has a lacuna
of two leaves {cf the diagram on p. 2*). It would be possible to supply a non
A-class representation of the missing chapters through the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century paper manuscripts AM 446 4to (= Th) and AM 129 fol.
(= H), both apparently from a somewhat shortened and simplified lost text.
This may perhaps be done on a separate occasion.
In the introduction, a letter as graph is enclosed in angle brackets < ); a
letter as phoneme is italicized. Quotations from the actual text are enclosed
in single quotation marks. The sign r is used where more than one manu-
script is being quoted, meaning that not only the immediately preceding.
word has a variant form but also the word(s) preceding it, as far back as this
sign.
In the texts, letters that are not clearly legible are placed in square
brackets [ ], where it is possible to make a reasonable guess at such letters,
and the situation is explained in a note. Parentheses are used for expansions
of words suspended after one, or a few, letters e g ‘G(eirridur)’, ‘Sn(orri)’,
‘Nor(egi)’. Insertion of editorial material is indicated by angle brackets e g
‘<N)u’, where the initial has not been executed. These are also used where
a letter, word or words have been supplied from a corresponding locus in
another manuscript. I have tried to adhere to the principle that my text is
so Forrest S. Scott 1985, in particular p. 88: “it seems not unreasonable to claim that, at some
stage, some parts of Eyrbyggja have passed through a female imagination”. See also Jennifer
Livesay 1988, “Women and Narrative Structure in Eyrbyggja saga”, which examines in detail
“changing rðles, power and responsibilities of men and women” in mediaeval Iceland.
81 Kellogg 1973, p. 257.