Gripla - 2023, Síða 198
196 GRIPLA
remains unclear what the actual purpose of these holes was.52 Based on the
sewing stations visible today, it is difficult to say for certain that PU1, PU2
and PU3 were already physically bound together by the time the table of
contents was added; yet, the fact that it lists texts in all three production
units strongly indicates that they were preserved together, maybe as either
an unbound or only provisionally bound manuscript to begin with.53
As previously indicated, leaves have gone missing from the manuscript,
and the current collation includes fifteen gatherings. Below, a reconstruc-
tion of a possible collation from around 1400 is portrayed (figure 2). This
reconstruction is based on the premise that a quaternion, a gathering made
of four bifolia, was the most common size in medieval Europe and that
most of the intact gatherings used as the building blocks for the various
medieval production units in AM 239 fol. are also quaternions.54 The
number of missing leaves in the reconstruction was calculated by compar-
ing C. R. Unger’s 1874 Postola Sögur edition and AM 239 fol., which needs
approximately 70–72 percent of the lines of Unger’s edition. In figure 2,
gatherings that are still intact today are presented in yellow, while gather-
ings that were either reconstructed partly or as a whole are presented in
pink. Arabic numbers represent the current foliation; likewise, the gather-
ings in the reconstruction are counted in Arabic numbers, in order to set
them apart from the current collation. The reconstruction suggests that, in
its state around 1400 when the ownership note and the table of contents
were added, this composite manuscript counted over 150 leaves in twenty
gatherings, meaning that AM 239 fol.’s possible original size is comparable
to manuscripts such as AM 350 fol. (currently 157 leaves) or AM 226 fol.
(currently 158 leaves).
Some irregularities are accounted for, such as the size of the first gath-
52 Personal correspondence from January 13, 2022.
53 Potentially, wear of the outermost bifolia of complete gatherings could indicate that the
book was unbound for a while. A survey of these bifolia was, however, inconclusive: Some
gatherings (e.g. III, IV, V and VII) show an outermost bifolium that is slightly glossier and
darker in color than the bifolia they enclose. Other gatherings (e.g. VI, VIII, IX and X)
show these characteristics on bifolia that lie in the middle of the quire.
54 G. S. Ivy, “The Bibliography of the Manuscript Book,” in The English Library Before 1700.
Studies in Its History, ed. Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (London: Athlones Press,
1958), 39, and Elias Avery Lowe, ed., Codices Latini Antiquiores. A Palaeographical Guide to
Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century. Lowe. Part 2 Great Britain and Ireland, Codices
Latini Antiquiores 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), x.