Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.10.2003, Síða 88
70*
M (AM 445 b 4tó)
(f. 6): ‘þetta blad ur Evrbvggia sðgu sendi mier Monsr Ormur
Dadason 1724. Enn hann hafde þad feinged á Skardi, sama ár 1724.
8. Maji.’
f. 9r at foot: ‘Ur Eyrbyggia Sögu. feinged A° 1715 fra Monsieur
Orme Dadasyne i Flatey. ’
f. lOr at foot: ‘Ur Eyrbyggia Sögu | fengit A° 1716. fra Monsr Orme
Dadasyne.’
Ormur Daðason (1684-1744) was Árni Magnússon’s cousin (his mother
was the sister of Árni’s father), and lived in western Iceland most of his
life, from 1727 as sheriff (sýslumaður) of Dalasýsla. In 1715 Ormur Daða-
son married the daughter of Þorsteinn Þórðarson of Skarð á Skarðsströnd
(Dal.), whose father was the Þórður Jónsson referred to above (fn. 1). Séra
Þórður had made extensive use of M around the middle of the seventeenth
century. At that time the manuscript was clearly in a much more complete
state than when Árni Magnússon collected the remains of it half a century
later. Although the text of Landnámabók already had a lacuna of one leaf
(Jakob Benediktsson 1974, p. xxxv), the text of Eyrbyggja saga, from
which séra Þórður copied readings into AM 447 4to (see below, pp. 123*-
30*), appears to have been complete. Except for a short stretch on the now-
lost leaf immediately before the present f. 6 (see Diagram p. 72*), where
the vellum seems to have been hard to read and perhaps damaged (see
textual note to 447, 17.6), there are entries from every part of the saga and
these include text from the parts of f. 10 which were lost when the leaf was
cut up to make a book-cover.
It is not known when and where Árni Magnússon came by the remaining
eight leaves of what survives of M, but it seems a reasonable guess that
they, too, came from Skarð á Skarðsströnd. The circumstances seem to
indicate that séra Þórður owned the manuscript, that after his death it
passed to his son Þorsteinn (d. 1700), and that its subsequent mutilation
took place at Skarð. It is hardly unfair to blame Þorsteinn Þórðarson for
this; Árni Magnússon acquired several vellum leaves from Skarð that had
been used for book-binding (c/below on AM 447 4to), and in one case he
states expressly that the book in question was bound under Þorsteinn’s
auspices.2
There seem to be four hands in AM 445 b 4to:
2 AM 447 4to was bound between two leaves of AM 39 fol. (Heimskringla, ca 1300) when Ámi
Magnússon received it from Þorsteinn Þórðarson as early as 1686, c/below, p. 123*; three leaves
of AM 162 B fol., a manuscript of Njáls saga from ca 1400, can be traced to séra Þórður Jónsson,
and on one of them Ámi has written “utan af qveri á Skardi er verid hefur eign Sr. Þordar i Hitar-
dal” (Kálund’s KatAM). A piece cut out of an early twelfth-century fragment of a sermon, now