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were not complete books, covering the full service for the full year, but
rather winter or summer books, sometimes only covering the sanctorale,
or even only Sundays.52 The largest gathering of them was kept at Vellir
in Svarfaðardalr: five copies, two of them donated by a certain Erlingr.
This is unsurprising since Vellir was the largest parish church library in
the north.53 Two other churches in the Hólar diocese, the Grenjaðarstaðr
noted earlier and Háls in Fnjóskadalr, had four aspiciensbœkr at certain
points in time.54 The other types of books with comparable frequency
to the aspiciensbók are all similarly basic, core liturgical books: messubœkr
(Mass-books), Graduals, lesbœkr, Psalters, söngbœkr, and perhaps the only
unexpectedly common type, sequentiubœkr (books of Sequences).
It is difficult to make confident judgements about how the aspiciens-
bœkr of Hólar diocese might have changed over time, but generally there
seems to have been some consistency. The 1394 lists show slightly fewer
aspiciensbœkr distributed across slightly fewer churches – thirty-three
books in twenty-one churches – even as the total number of books listed
increased.55 The 1461 lists show a similar slight growth in the total number
of books, again with thirty-three aspiciensbœkr across now only eighteen
century. However, if it was the case that aspiciens came into use as a category of book in
Iceland from conventional Anglo-Saxon practice, then these dates are a moot point, since
the term must have been in use since the eleventh century.
52 DI II, 428–80; Oleson, “Book Collections of Medieval Icelandic Churches,” 503. Oleson
suggests that eight of these churches had complete aspiciensbœkr, but in many of these
instances the text simply states aspiciensbók, and it is hard to be sure that this implies
a complete Antiphonal or whether it is just a more minimal description than in other
passages.
53 At Vellir, the reference to the donation is gone by 1394, but otherwise the same books
appear to be there (DI II, 455; DI III, 512).
54 Háls preserves the unusual description of two of its aspiciensbœkr being bound in English
bindings, which remains in 1394, though the descriptions of the two smaller copies had
changed by then (DI II, 439; DI III, 573). Grenjaðarstaðr, as noted earlier, is very broad in
describing its book collection in 1318, and while the physical aspiciensbœkr may have been
there, among the group of söngbœkr, they are not mentioned by name; two of them are
named in 1391, but the full four do not appear until the 1461 list (DI IV, 20; DI V, 282).
55 DI III, 512-94. Oleson counts an increase from 744 books to 1,095 books from 1318 to 1394
(Tryggvi J. Oleson, “Book Collections of Icelandic Churches in the Fourteenth Century,”
Nordisk Tidskrift för Bok- och Biblioteksväsen 46 (1959): 115). As Oleson himself is careful to
note several times in his articles, the uncertain consistency of the lists means that this count
is very rough. Equally, the nature of what is understood as a book is highly questionable,
and there may have been items reckoned as a book here that consisted of no more than a
small gathering.
THE LOST LITURGICAL BOOKS OF ICELAND