Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 190

GRIPLA188
Of the remaining fragments, two are from German translations of the
Disticha Catonis; Law French, meanwhile, is represented by a bifolium
from a Year Book of Edward I covering lawsuits in the West Country in
1302. The remainder are Latin, mostly liturgical or devotional in nature:
biblical commentaries, a probable lectionary, a Liber extra, a capitulare
evangelium, and music in the form of a modest scrap from an antiphonary
(covering parts of Matins for the feast of St John the Baptist). There are
in addition bits of poetry, texts appearing to deal with canon law, part of
Jacques de Guyse’s history of Hainault, and a medical text.
Of these fragments, by far the most interesting – certainly the most
unusual – is that which consists of the first three leaves (a bifolium and a
singleton). It is fairly modest in size, each leaf being about 130 mm wide
and 150 mm tall. The bulk of the recto of the first folio, and about half the
verso, is a speech from the fifteenth century for the opening of a market
in the Vestmannaeyjar between English and Icelandic merchants; this has
been edited in Diplomatarium Islandicum and is not reproduced or further
discussed here.4 Of interest instead is the use to which the remainder of
the fragment has been put.
In the margins
The lower margins of the first leaf, together with the entirety of the sec-
ond and third, are in the hand of bishop Gissur Einarsson (ca. 1512–1548),
an identification first proposed by Jón Þorkelsson and readily confirmed
by comparison with Gissur’s correspondence book, AM 232 8vo.5 In the
lower margin of 1r, Gissur has added a citation from Hávamál, quoted by
name:
[Obr]igdara vin fær madur alldrei en mannvit micet. Havamal
(A man can have no more reliable friend than great sense. Hávamál)
This strophe is not found in any earlier manuscripts except for the Codex
Regius of the Poetic Edda, GKS 2365 4to; furthermore, of all the manu-
scripts to cite Hávamál prior to bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson’s discovery
4 DI 4, 276–7, where it is dated to 1420; Jón Helgason, “Catalogue,” np., suggests that it
could be as late as 1500.
5 Jón Þorkelsson, “Islandske haandskrifter,” 212.