Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series B - 01.06.1983, Page 190
CLXXXIV
Inngangur
7.4. Ámi Magnússon acquired 111 in 1707 from a man in
Borgarfjörður in the west of Iceland. It has not been possible to
find any relationship between this man and the scribe.
7.5. The modest dimensions of 111 do not allow for much
narrative material to be incorporated in it and the text consists
first and foremost of annalistic and chronological entries. It is
very corrupt and the worst corruptions concem the chronology.
This may in part reflect an incorrect arrangement and possibly a
defective state of the source. It is clear that the abstract derives
in the main from GA, since the text contains material and a few
readings which characterise this version as against the other
Guðmundar sagas and Sturl. On the other hand, there is also a
little material in 111 which does not have parallels in GA but
first and foremost in GB; these snippets may have been inserted
from memory. In a few cases 111 has readings that are superior
to those in Aa1 and since 111 can thus hardly derive from Aa1, it
has been printed here as an appendix to GA.
8.0. As a result of Guðbrandur Vigfússon’s' examinations in
his edition of Bisk, with some corrections by Björn M. Olsen, it
is clear that GA is a compilation which has as its sources
Guðmundr’s priest-saga (PG), Hrafns saga Sveinbjamarsonar
(Hr), Sturla Þórðarson’s Islendinga saga (Is), Áróns saga
Hjörleifssonar (Ár) and annals. According to Björn M. Olsen,
whose hypotheses as to the relationship between the various
Guðmundar sagas and Sturlunga saga have been accepted in
the main ever since they were first proposed in 1902, four of
these sources were used for the compilation of a Guðmundar
saga a, which was assumed to have formed the basis for both
GA and GB and to have been expanded in GA with material
from Ár. There are several facts, however, which argue against
the existence of a, and GA and GB are much more likely - as
assumed by Guðbrandur Vigfússon - to be independent compi-
lations on the basis of partly the same material. The accounts
by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Bjöm M. Ólsen of the sources of
GA form with certain modifications - in particular with relation
to the annalistic material - the basis for the following survey.
8.1. PG (cf. §8.2) in all probability contained annal entries
which, besides GA, are also found in Sturl, in so far as this
saga does not abbreviate its PG-text, and in GB, where this
saga is not defective. In addition to this, GA contains a
considerable amount of annalistic material. For the period from
Guðmundr’s birth in 1161 and up to 1176 practically all the
annal entries are shared by the texts in GA, Sturl and GB.