Gripla - 2022, Page 260

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simply a reference to Guðbrandur.78 Most recently, in 2012, Guðvarður
Már Gunnlaugsson published a short note on the medieval terminology
for books in Iceland. There he expands upon the definition given by the
Dictionary of Old Norse Prose and suggests that the large letters of the as-
piciensbœkr could also aid monks and clerics who had poor vision and/or
difficulty seeing in the dim light of medieval Icelandic churches, and makes
note of a certain aspiciensbók that is called stórrituð (largely written).79
While such difficulties of vision must have been a consideration, and may
have even encouraged some books to be stórrituð, it remains that the term
aspiciens has nothing to do with how or where the books were viewed.
A few scholars, in addressing liturgical books in the historical context
of medieval Iceland, have brought up the Antiphonal, but do not connect
it to the aspiciensbók.80 For most of the twentieth century and the first two
decades of the twenty-first, Guðbrandur Jónsson’s misunderstanding of
aspiciens as a description of how the book is read, rather than a key incipit
in the text, has remained authoritative.
The Icelandic máldagar are a rich and fascinating corpus of texts, and
one of our most important insights into the liturgical life of the island. The
78 onp.ku.dk/onp/onp.php?o4928.
79 Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson, “Af aspiciensbók, reddingabók og fleiri bókum,” Geisla-
baugur: fægður Margaret Cormack sextugri, 23. ágúst 2012, ed. by Margrét Eggertsdóttir et al.
(Reykjavík: Menningar- og minningarsjóður, 2012) 37.
80 Perhaps most notably, aspiciensbók was not mentioned by Lilli Gjerløw either in her 1980
edition of the Icelandic liturgical fragments, Liturgica Islandica, or in her 1979 edition
of the Antiphonal of Niðaróss archdiocese, of which Iceland was part, Antiphonarium
Nidrosiensis Ecclesiae. Gunnar F. Guðmundsson mentioned Antiphonals in his general study
of Christianity in medieval Iceland, but glosses the Latin antiphonarium as andstefjabók, a
more or less direct calquing of the Latin term that does not appear to have any medieval
precedent (Gunnar F. Guðmundsson, Íslensk samfélagi og Rómakirkja, Kristni á Íslandi 2
(Rekyjavík: Alþingi, 2000), 201). Kristján Eldjárn and Hörður Ágústsson, Skálholt, 289,
discusses the Antiphonal separately from aspiciensbók, and from the one reference given,
the authors appear to have been focused strictly on uses of the Latin term antiphonarius in
the Icelandic sources. Finally, Oleson himself identifies the lesgrallari as an antiphonarium,
but his definition of an antiphonarium is misleadingly literal, seemingly suggesting that
the book really did only contain the antiphons of the Office (Oleson, “Book Collections
of Iceland Icelandic Churches in the Fifteenth Century,” 93). He notes five lesgrallarar in
the 1461 lists, and the term seems not to be used in the fourteenth century but does appear
again at Hólar cathedral, Þingeyrar monastery, and the church of Laufás in the 1525 lists (DI
IX, 296, 313, 331). It is not clear what might have distinguished a lesgrallari from a normal
Gradual, if anything, though it seems safest to assume that the les refers to a compilation of
additional material into the book.