Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series B - 01.06.1960, Side 12

X
apart the large codex in which 11 was once contained.
Arni Magnússon received this codex from séra Högni
Ámundason, d. 1707, whose wife, Þórunn Torfadóttir,
was a granddaughter of Jón Gissursson. It was older
than 1646, and 11 may be the oldest surviving manu-
script of the saga.
There are several other primary manuscripts: Sth.
Papp. 4to nr 13, AM 10, fol., Gl. kgl. sml. 1002, fol.,
Sth. Papp. fol. nr 1, Adv. 21.4.17, B.M. Add. 11,162,
4to, and perhaps the fragment in Ny kgl. sml. 339,
8vo. All these offer texts which seem to be quite
unrehable, and because they have so many evident
mistakes and alterations, their testimony is of little
weight in textual criticism. The peculiarities of these
manuscripts are recorded in Bibl. Arnam. XXIV, and
only one of them has been used inthis edition, namely
S13.
Sth. Papp. 4to nr 13, written in various unidenti-
fied hands of the seventeenth century. Hrólfs saga
kraka, copied by two scribes and finished on Peb-
ruary 28th, 1673, is the third of the nine sagas in
the manuscript. S13 has been given a place in this
edition in order to provide an example of the less
valuable primary manuscripts; its variants, which
occasionally make the text unintelhgible, are not very
useful in textual criticism, but they illustrate well the
degree of corruption of some of the primary sources.
The Common Original.
Several of the manuscripts mentioned above could
be used as the basis of an edition, and the choice has
fallen upon 285. The text of 285 has been transcribed
and printed with no more alteration than is necessary;
full variants have been given from 9, 109, S17, 11 and
S13 (see below, p. XVIII).
There is no decisive reason for choosing 285 to