Gripla - 2022, Síða 194

GRIPLA192
of such manuscripts has, however, yielded no fruit to date. It is therefore
impossible to say whether the annotations which Gissur copied were the
work of one individual (Þorvarður or otherwise) or several; it may be that
Þorvarður was merely the latest in a long line of owners, many of whom
added to the crowded margins of the manuscript.
It is, furthermore, impossible to say whether Gissur was in fact copy-
ing from a single manuscript. Gissur’s heading uses the genitive singular
“legisterij” and we may assume that at the time of writing he intended
it to refer to a single law-book. This notwithstanding, there are indica-
tions which point to Gissur, having finished copying the marginalia from
Þorvarður’s law-book, carrying on with marginalia from others. There are
three horizontal lines across the width of an entire column, all on 3r, which
divide the text into four sections which we might for convenience refer to
as A, B, C and D. Section A, the longest, runs from the beginning of the
text at 2r, column 1, line 3 to 3r col. 1 l. 7; B from 3r col. 1 l. 8 to 3r col. 1 l.
20; C from 3r col. 1 l. 21 to 3r col. 2 l. 29; and D from 3r col. 2 l. 30 to the
end of the text at 3v col. 2 l. 37. The contents of these four sections are dis-
tinct: for instance, A has a great preponderance of Latin, which is entirely
absent from B and not much in evidence in C or D; only D has Jónsbók rét-
tarbætr; C makes two (possibly spurious) references to Sachsenspiegel, not
mentioned in any of the others; one short admonition (“Caue scurrilitatem
varaztu osæmilegt gaman”)11 appears, with slightly different wording, in
both A and D.
In short the appearance is of four separate collections of marginalia,
accumulated by four separate individuals or groups of individuals with
different interests and access to different sources. Most tellingly, A ends
with a large chunk of the early part of the Proverbia Wiponis, which ends
abruptly at the juncture with B; the likeliest explanation for such a rela-
tively substantial block of text is that it was added to the blank space at the
end of the manuscript.12 The premature ending may be because there was
not space to complete the Proverbia in the original or because the last leaf
was lost or the verso of the last leaf abraded beyond the point of legibility.
11 Item 144, below; cf. item 33, “Caue scurilitatem osæmiligt gaman”.
12 Items 62–110, below, excluding items 70 and 100. The first few of the Proverbia, items 52
and 58–59, are mixed in with other marginalia, before the copying of the Proverbia begins
in earnest.