Gripla - 2022, Page 244

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indications that some of the scribes for the 1431 lists had a taste for Latin
terminology.16 The most notable use of antiphonarius, however, is in the
extensive 1461 book list for the Augustinian house of Möðruvellir in
Hörgárdalr. In this list there are seven books titled antiphonarius and two
titled antiphonabók, and not a single mention of aspiciens.17 No antiphonari-
us or antiphonabók appears in Möðruvellir’s shorter 1525 book list, and two
aspiciensbœkr have appeared in their place.18 Likewise, all but one of these
fifteenth-century lists that use antiphonarius also mention a Gradual, so
we can be fairly confident that it is an Office book, the Antiphonal, being
described, rather than a Mass book.19 It seems clear then that antiphonarius
and aspiciensbók were used in Iceland primarily to refer to the same type of
books, and that two or three fifteenth-century scribes in northern Iceland
simply had a preference for the Latin term.
Much more ambiguous is söngbók, almost certainly a direct borrowing
of the Old English term sangboc.20 Indeed, here the Icelandic situation
seems more comparable to the Anglo-Saxon one. In Gneuss’ analysis of
Old English sangboc, the term is shown to refer to choir books for both
the Office and the Mass, i.e. both Graduals and Antiphonals.21 The word
16 DI IV, 465–66. The Árskógr list is just particularly rich in the sort of Latin termino-
logy common in the máldagar. The Tjörn list, however, includes a second type of rare
Latin book word: breviarius (Breviary) which, as will be discussed below, is rarely seen in
Icelandic book lists. The Tjörn Breviary is unusual, moreover, in that the scribe is actually
noting that the book has gone missing, and has not been seen at the church since a priest
named Sigurðr and a certain Jón Einarsson departed – perhaps a coy suggestion that one of
these men made off with the valuable tome.
17 DI V, 286–90.
18 DI IX, 317–18.
19 The exception is the 1461 máldagi for Höskuldsstaðir (DI V, 344–46), which is perhaps
unsurprising, since the book collection is minimally described, and as noted earlier the
antiphonarius appears in an addition to the core text. Icelandic book lists use the Latin term
for a Gradual, but often in the form of a significantly altered loanword, so it can either be
written graduale or grallari, or some variant of these two basic forms. The relationship bet-
ween grallari and its source is more transparent when the Latin term drops the “u” (gradale),
see for example The Libraries of the Augustinian Canons, 383–85. The variable Latin forms
also gave rise to the English vernacular term from the Gradule, “grail,” see for example
Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval English, 513. See also footnote 41.
20 In light of the extensive influence of the English language on early Icelandic ecclesiastical
language and intellectual culture, see for example Ryder Patzuk-Russell, The Development of
Education in Medieval Iceland (Berlin: De Gruyter/Medieval Institute Publications, 2021),
196.
21 Gneuss, “Liturgical Books,” 103. Gneuss argues that sangboc shares the same sense as the