Gripla - 2022, Page 251

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Despite the difficulty of the terminology, it is clear that two core
parts of the Breviary, the Lectionary and the Collectar, circulated in late
medieval Iceland. Without knowing the contents of these books, it is
impossible to know for sure, but their presence may indicate that at some
Icelandic churches the celebrant of the Office continued to use a number
of different books into the fourteenth and fifteenth century, rather than
a single Breviary.47 At the same time, some churches without a doubt did
use Breviaries, though they were not as common as the other types of
core liturgical books.48 The Latin term breviarium appears in two differ-
ent churches in the fifteenth century, as well as at the Augustinian house
of Viðey in the fourteenth. The Old Norse terms derived from the Latin,
brefér and its several variants, appear in at least six different contexts in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.49
term (Gneuss, “Liturgical Books,” 125–26). The possibility that these legendubœkr are
Lectionaries specifically for the sanctorale may be supported by the “Legenda de sanctis ä
ij selskinns Bokum” (legenda of the saints in two seal-skin books) in the church of Múli in
1318 (DI II, 435). The same list also mentions legendubœkr for the full year. However, for
an English example of a legenda that includes both temporale and sanctorale, see Pfaff, The
Liturgy in Medieval England, 402–4.
47 Iceland had little influence from the mendicant orders, whose widely travelling members
were a primary driver of the use of larger, more complete liturgical books, and it is possible
that this may have contributed to a particularly slow response to the development of more
complete Breviaries and Missals. But Breviaries may also have been seen as less necessary
than the other core liturgical books in early fourteenth-century England, see note 7.
48 The term tíðabók (book of hours) is glossed as a Breviary in Cleasby-Vigfússon (Cleasby
and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 633). However, in this case
the tíða prefix likely does not refer to the Office specifically, but rather the divine liturgy
as a whole, since in many of its appearances tíðabók seems to refer generally to the full col-
lection of liturgical books at a church. The Skálholt lists use tíðabók more frequently than
the Hólar lists, and the frequent phrase xii mánaða tíðabœkr, rather than an identification
of a particular type of book, seems more likely to indicate that the church has the core Mass
and Office books for the full year, see for example DI III, 32, 85; DI IV, 136, 142, 148, 160,
172. In no cases do we have any indication that tíðabók refers to what are conventionally
known as Books of Hours, late medieval books of private prayer largely based on the
psalms. It is thus probably best to gloss tíðabók simply as “service book” or “book for the
liturgy.”
49 Oleson’s articles entirely overlook brevarius and related terms, which is all the more
surprising considering how he considers other terms as possibly referring to Breviaries.
Olmer gives two examples of breviarius/breviarium, and five more of the derived Old Norse
terms brefér and breferi (Emil Olmer, Boksamlingar på Island 1179–1490 (Göteborg: Wald.
Zachrissons Boktryckeri, 1902), 9); the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose gives the variable
forms brefér, breferi, and breferr (onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o10757). There were a number of
brefér of several types at Hólar in 1396 (DI III, 612), one at Presthólar in 1394 (DI III, 553),
THE LOST LITURGICAL BOOKS OF ICELAND