Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series B - 01.10.1968, Page 149
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aubjects and heroes and turn to biblical ones1.
Tlie bishop received support for his appeal from
several ministers, including Sigurður Jónsson’s father,
Jón Bjarnason 4 Presthólum (j c. 1634). It is gene-
rally considered, however, that the biblical rímur
never really became popular and Sigurður Nordal
says, in the preface to his facsimile edition of Vísnabók
(p. 23), that Bishop Guðbrandur suffered his most
signal defeat in this battle against the profane rímur.
Nevertheless, two sets of sacred rímur are among the
most popular of all rímur, “Bímur af barndómi Jesú
Krists” and KrR. They are both, of course, com-
posed on the basis of apocryphal stories and thus,
in reality, non-biblical but they can doubtless be
attributed to the genre initiated by Bishop Guð-
brandur.
The manuscripts
Of the 26 MSS in which KrR have survived,
one is found in Oxford, one in Copenhagen, all the
others in Iceland. The majority of the MSS are from
the 19th century, a few from the second half of the
18th, but none apparently older than from 1750,
i.e. they are all at least a century younger than the
original MS of the rímur. This is strange in considera-
tion of the fact that the poem must have been very
popular. It is possible that several texts from the
17th century were lost in the fire of Copenhagen
in 1728. It has been pointed out elsewhere2 that
there are such considerable gaps in the Arnamagnæan
Collection’s stock of 17th-century Icelandic poetry,
1. Ed. Sigurður Nordal, Monumenta Typographica Islandica V,
1937, pp. 12, 18 f. Cf. Jón Þorkelsson: Om digtningen pá Island
i det 15. og 16. árh., 1888, pp. 127, 132; Björn K. Þórólfsson:
Rímur fyrir 1600, Safn Fræðafjelagsins IX, 1934, p. 28 f.
2. Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana XXIX, 1967, p. 5; Kvæðabók úr
Vigur, facsimile edition vol. B, p. 60.