Gripla - 2022, Page 378

GRIPLA376
Guðmundur Erlendsson’s lifetimes. These are AM 615 f 4to, AM 149 8vo
and AM 436 12mo.
All three of these manuscripts are listed in Kålund’s catalogue of
the Arnamagnæan Collection as being from “17. årh.” (the seventeenth
century),47 which is imprecise but fits well with both Jón Magnússon í
Laufási’s and Guðmundur Erlendsson’s authorship as they were born in
1601 and c. 1595 respectively. More accurate dating is difficult to arrive at,
but there are some clues. AM 615 f 4to also contains the Króka-Refs rímur
composed by Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–84). Finnur Sigmundsson,
when editing these rímur, took a different manuscript as his base text,
namely AM 614 4to, and said that it was the oldest of the preserved wit-
nesses and written in 1656. He does not explain how he arrived at this
conclusion, but if we accept it, then that would mean that AM 615 f 4to
must be dated to the second half of the seventeenth century.48 Moreover,
AM 615 f 4to contains a single additional fitt, one of the continuations,
named “Háðgælur” (Mocking-Rhymes) and normally attributed to Jón
Sigurðsson lögsagnari (c. 1685–1720). If this attribution is correct, then the
manuscript must have been composed at the very end of the seventeenth
century (if not the start of the eighteenth). The next early witness, AM
149 8vo, is composed of fourteen separate sections, with Grobbians rímur in
the tenth. Here again, one of the companion pieces, namely a poem named
Hringsdrápa, helps us date the section of the manuscript with more preci-
sion. Hringsdrápa was written by Vigfús Jónsson á Leirulæk (often called
Leirulækjar-Fúsi, 1648–1728), also author of one of the Grobbians rímur
continuations. Assuming (generously) that he was at the very least twelve
years old by the time he wrote the poem, this lets us know once again that
the manuscript section must have been produced, at the earliest, in the
late seventeenth century. AM 436 12mo came to Árni Magnússon from
his paternal aunt, Halldóra Ketilsdóttir (1640–1727), but we do not know
47 Kålund, Katalog over den Arnamagnæanske haandskriftsamling, II:25, 415, 485.
48 Hallgrímur Pétursson, Króka-Refs rímur og Rímur af Lykla-Pétri og Magelónu eftir Síra
Hallgrím Pétursson, ed. by Finnur Sigmundsson, Rit Rímnafélagsins VII (Reykjavík:
Rímnafélagið, 1956), ix. Finnur (p. xi) also mentions that the rímur seem fairly clearly to
refer to the hardships Hallgrímur suffered with his wife, Guðríður Símonardóttir, so at the
very least it seems that the rímur, and thus the manuscripts too, must have been produced
after the couple met in 1636.