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mation about how these lists were made and used, we can never be sure of
how complete an extant book list or inventory might be.60
Many more aspiciensbœkr must have existed in medieval Iceland than
are mentioned in the Hólar diocese máldagar. As the donation of Erlingr
to Vellir shows, there is no doubt that aspiciensbœkr were held in private
ownership. Perhaps the most frequent owners were priests, but records
of donations usually indicated whether a person was a priest, and Erlingr
was thus almost certainly a layperson. The diocese of Skálholt was like-
wise larger than Hólar, and there is a good chance that its churches col-
lectively owned more books, but the máldagar record for Skálholt is poor.
Even among the surviving ones, there is often only a general mention of
unidentified books or just a valuation of the collection.61 Oleson does
speculate that, issues with the surviving evidence aside, Skálholt churches
were probably poorer in books that Hólar ones.62 It is difficult to accept
this conclusion at the present stage of the research, however, and it simply
demonstrates that more thorough and critical study of the evidence for
medieval Icelandic books collections is needed.
Reception of the Term
The term aspiciensbók, on the few occasions when it has been addressed by
scholars, has generally been misunderstood. A survey of the scholarship
discourse surrounding this term can help us understand why and how this
happened, and how extensively. Exploring this misunderstanding can in
turn provide insight into the difficulties of studying the extant evidence
60 Halldór Hermannsson points to the lack of books in the 1525 list for Möðruvellir monas-
tery, relative to its massive 1461 collection, as evidence of the decline of that library
decades before the Reformation (Halldór Hermannsson, Icelandic Manuscripts, Islandica
19 (Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 1929), 33–34). Since Halldór’s main point is about
the disappearance of vernacular texts, it may well be that some less functional parts of the
library were sold off, but it may equally be that, as Oleson suggests for Vellir, the 1525 list
only includes new acquisitions.
61 The most complete máldagar collection for Skálholt, made by Bishop Vilchin Hinriksson
around 1397, mentions only fourteen aspiciensbœkr in twelve churches (DI IV, 43–207), out
of a list of nearly three hundred churches. There must have been many more in the diocese,
however. The Vilchin lists avoid descriptions of books in multiple ways, including simply
give the valuation or size of the book collection, with little or no detail, for example DI IV,
67, 83, 86, 155.
62 Oleson, “Book Collections of Icelandic Churches in the Fourteenth Century,” 118, note 1.
THE LOST LITURGICAL BOOKS OF ICELAND