Editiones Arnamagnæanæ. Series B - 01.10.1983, Side 63

LIX
generally assumed to have been made at the Norwe-
gian court (cf. pp. xvnff.).21
The scribe has a tendency to use as much paper as
possible. There is nothing but the title on the first
page, and the chapter-headings, which all occupy
several lines, were clearly composed by Jón Vigfús-
son. Syntactic and orthographic characteristics of Jón
Vigfússon’s language also reflect this tendency to
extravagance: the frequent addition of at after con-
junctions, sem at, ef at, þegar at, hvi at (and even in a
construction such as ‘munnur hanns var sem at onnur
hamragia’ (!) 10:15-16), and the fact that the MS
contains very few abbreviations. Very occasionally a
nasal stroke is employed over a single nasal to
indicate doubling, han.22
The 19th-century editors of riddarasogur, Kölbing,
Cederschiöld and Klockhoff, tended to leave Jón Vig-
fússon’s transcripts out of account when establishing a
text. The modemisations described above have given
his transcripts a generally ‘late’ appearance; in addi-
tion, the transcripts are rather careless (with omis-
sions, misunderstandings, words and sentences left
incomplete). Since Jón Vigfússon’s transcripts often
differ greatly in content and expression from the other
MSS of a given saga, there has been a tendency to
assume that these differences, too, are to be ascribed
to Jón Vigfússon. Thus, Kölbing in Riddarasögur
(1872) characterises Ivens saga in Stockh. 46 as
21 On the use of Norwegianisms in Icelandic MSS of the 14th
century, see Stefán Karlsson, ‘Om norvagismer i islandske hánd-
skrifter,’ Maal og Minne 1978, pp. 87-101.
22 A list of similar padding in one of Jón Vigfússon’s transcripts
which was made from an exemplar that still survives has been
published in Otto J. Zitzelsberger, ‘The filiation of the manuscripts
of Konráðs saga keisarasonar’, Amsterdamer Beitráge zur álteren
Germanistik 16 (1981), p. 174 (n. 34).