Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 254

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churches.56 Small changes are expected as older books fall out of use or
as separate volumes are bound together into larger compilations, and cer-
tainly some máldagar are incomplete, and some churches are even missing
from lists. The final collection, from 1525, is very incomplete and only in-
cludes a few parish churches: just six books at three churches, and another
two at Möðruvellir monastery, are mentioned.57 Notably, it does include
Vellir and does not name any aspiciensbœkr there. Oleson, while he did not
address any sixteenth-century máldagar, did speculate that the small num-
ber of total books at Vellir in 1461 may have been because the list there was
simply an addition to an older list.58
The máldagar are highly layered documents, newer passages accumu-
lating upon older ones. Some layers of Icelandic máldagar may be from as
early as the late twelfth century, but we know next to nothing about the
collections of those earlier centuries and therefore cannot say when or how
the libraries of the fourteenth century were formed. The great library of
Vellir in the fourteenth century may have been pre-eminent for centuries,
or it may have been the new innovation of some intrepid cleric.59 It is thus
entirely possible that the library declined in size in the fifteenth century.
However, in light of the lack of medieval máldagar manuscripts and infor-
56 DI V, 253–351. The increase, by Oleson’s count, is only from 1,095 to 1,104 books, but
as Oleson himself is careful to note, there are fewer churches with máldagar preserved
in the fifteenth-century Hólar lists, so the count is deceptive, and the average number of
books per church is actually significantly higher (Tryggvi J. Oleson, “Book Collections of
Icelandic Churches in the Fifteenth Century,” Nordisk Tidskrift för Bok- och Biblioteksväsen
47 (1960): 95).
57 DI IX, 318–31.
58 Oleson, “Book Collections of Icelandic Churches in the Fifteenth Century,” 97.
59 Lárentíus saga comments on Þórarinn Egilsson (d. 1277): “Síra Þórarinn kaggi var klerkr
góðr ok hinn mesti nytsemðamaðr til letrs ok bókagjörða sem enn mega auðsýnaz
margar bækr sem hann hfeir skrifat Hólakirkju ok svá Vallastað” (Biskupa sögur III: Árna
saga biskups, Lárentíus saga biskups, ed. by Guðrún Ása Grímsdóttir, Íslenzk Fornrit 17
(Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1998), 217; Reverend Þórarinn kaggi was a good
cleric and the most beneficial person in writing and bookmaking, as the many books which
he wrote can still be seen at the church of Hólar and also Vellir). The author of the saga may
be trying to suggest that the greatness of the library at Vellir is due to Þórarinn’s own work
in the mid-thirteenth century. While we cannot read such a passage at face value – Þórarinn
is, after all, a relative and teacher of the protagonist of the saga – it at least emphasizes the
possibility that a number of the books shown in the 1318 máldagi for Vellir may have only
been a few decades old.