Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series A - 01.10.2003, Blaðsíða 149

Textual features
127*
reference to the sea-goddess who welcomes the spirits of drowned men.
These two words are present in two of the three paper copies of the lost vel-
lum Vatnshyrna, Aa (copied by Asgeir Jónsson) and Aj (copied by Jón Gis-
sursson), while Ketill Jörundsson, in AM 442 4to (Ak), an intelligent scribe
but one who was sometimes impatient with what he did not understand, has
‘ad raunr’10 The words are absent in W and Z (and 447), and unfortunately
a lacuna begins in M only a few lines earlier, when f. 9 comes to an end. All
these manuscripts contain words to the effect that people regarded it as a
good omen if drowned men attended their own funeral feast, for then they
must have been “made welcome” (implicitly in the after-life), old beliefs
still being prevalent even though people were baptized and called them-
selves Christian. Either both W and Z, or their exemplars, omitted the
words at Ránar or their equivalent because, like Ketill, they did not under-
stand them, or else they were added in some descendant of *A' in the stem-
ma on p. 17* out of the copyist’s own knowledge of pagan deities, obtain-
ed from a study of Eddic poetry. I consider the latter quite likely, though of
course far from proven. There are a number of ÞJ’s additions to the text in
this neighbourhood and one feels that if at Ránar had been in M ÞJ would
very probably have inserted it. After all, one could hardly expect ÞJ to ad-
judicate on this question if there was nothing to prompt him.
An even more convincing case is ÞJ’s ‘verkamær’ (= G) for ‘verkmadur’
at 447 23.39. The A manuscripts say that Geirríðr, when visiting Holt in or-
der to apprehend the culprit Oddr Kqtluson, was accompanied by ‘verka
madr hennar’ (Aa), ‘huskarl hennar’ (Aj), ‘verkamadur hennar’ (Ak). Si-
milarly with Th ‘verk madur hennar’ and H ‘verk madur, (written ‘máj.
In W the noun is difficult to read (see the textual note to W 19.12). G’s
‘uerka mær’ is quite clear but it is reassuring to have ÞJ’s evidence that
mær was what M had too. The coincidence of Th, H, and the A texts is at
first surprising, but to most scribes the otherwise unattested verkamær must
have seemed a lectio difficilior, which makes it a good candidate for textu-
al convergence. One cannot, however, be certain about those longer passa-
ges of M that have no parallel in 447 and which one might have thought
sufficiently important to secure insertion by ÞJ.
The statistics about vísur are of some interest in assessing ÞJ’s activity.
Aa and Ak, which include all the known Eyrbyggja saga stanzas, contain
thirty-seven stanzas, cf the General introduction, note 37. Stanzas present
in M (whether or not complete) are numbers 34567891011 1213 1415
16 21 22 23 (total 17); of the 20 absent there (1 2 17 18 19 20 24 25 26 27
10 For Aa, Aj and Ak see the General introduction, pp. 13-15 and the stemma i Scott 2003,
p. 179.