Gripla - 2022, Page 196

GRIPLA194
ment are also in Gottskálk’s miscellany: the second excerpt from William
of Sabina in the lower margin of 1v (36v in 11242), and items 24 (36v), 25
(37v), 26 (37r), 27 (36r), 35 (36r), 36 (66v), 48 (38r), 112 (37v) and 146 (65v).
It is notable that the items in Gottskálk’s miscellany are found in two clus-
ters, suggesting that he may have copied them from the same source(s),16
and that a number of items which are consecutive in Gissur’s fragment are
found close to one another in Gottskálk’s text. It may also be worth noting
that Gissur’s and Gottskálk’s manuscripts are respectively the oldest and
second-oldest extant witnesses to item 27, a resolution of the Alþingi on
the carrying of knives.17
However, I do not intend to suggest that Gissur’s fragment was among
Gottskálk’s sources, since there are certain differences in the texts which
argue against this. Some are not necessarily conclusive: for example, item
112 has the title “at eide fe sitt og um skatthald” in Gissur’s fragment but
“Ad vina eid at Skatte” in Gottskálk’s; the beginning of the text proper
is severely truncated by Gissur and the end omitted by Gottskálk, but
both of these are conventional swearing formulae in any case. The most
significant difference is in item 35: Gissur has “Sex aurum ofundar bot edr
þockabot” where Gottskálk has “Sex avrvm aufvndar bot en f[iorir?] /
tv[ei]r avrar\ þocka bote” – evidently both men were faced with an unclear
exemplar when it came to the valuation of þokkabót and had different ap-
proaches to resolving the matter. I would suggest that they had, indeed,
one and the same exemplar. Gottskálk’s mother was Þorvarður’s second
wife and widow before marrying Gottskálk’s father Jón, and Gottskálk’s
sister Guðrún married Þorvarður’s son Erlendur (by his first wife), and
there can therefore be little doubt that Gottskálk would have had access
to Þorvarður’s library;18 given the shared texts, some of which I have been
unable to find anywhere else,19 it seems all but certain that Gottskálk drew
on Þorvarður’s law-book(s) as a source. The items found in Gottskálk’s
16 The current arrangement of gatherings and pages in 11242 is not original, and it is therefore
very possible that the items were originally closer together (the opposite is however not
true, since several of the items share a page with one another). See Gamall kveðskapur, ed.
by Jón Helgason (Copenhagen: Hið íslenzka fræðafélag, 1979), 8.
17 DI 4, 1–2.
18 ÍÆ 1, 447; ÍÆ 2, 92.
19 This observation is presented with the caveat that manuscripts of this period are outside my
field of particular expertise; that I have not found the texts elsewhere does not necessarily
mean they are not to be found.