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210 GRIPLA
AM 696 I 4to (no. 2 in Table 1) has been established to be a later copy.8
AM 655 4to, like the other five Old Norse medical manuscripts, contains
clauses originating in De gradibus, serving as a material illustration of
the dissemination of medical knowledge across the continent in the long
twelfth century: “Gras þat er rubea heitir, þat er roðagras – Þat hrindr út
ór óléttri konu, þó at barn sé dautt.” (The plant called rubea, that is roða-
gras [lit: reddening plant], expels a baby out of a pregnant woman, even if
it is dead).9 A similar clause can be found in Harpestræng’s herbal pharma-
cology, and the corresponding clause in De gradibus reads: “Radix rubeæ
mulieribus supposita menstrua prouocat, fœtum que mortuum expellit”
(the root of rose madder induces menstruation if put beneath a woman and
expels a dead foetus).10 Nevertheless, all six manuscripts in Table 1 also
include clauses that are absent from any known writings of Harpestræng.
For this reason, it has been speculated that Harpestræng may have written
another medical book, on diseases and cures, which no longer exists but
could have served as a source for the Old Norse manuscripts.11 The possi-
bility of alternative sources cannot be ruled out, but current knowledge of
Latin sources that were available in the medieval north is obfuscated by
the fact that the textual evidence is extremely fragmentary. For the north
as a whole, it has been estimated that 99 per cent of the Latin manuscript
leaves that existed at the start of the Reformation are now lost.12
A surge of interest in the Old Norse medical books around the turn of
the twentieth century led to almost all the existing editions and publica-
8 See Marius Hægstad, ed., Gamalnorsk fragment av Henrik Harpestreng, Skrifter udgiv-
ne af Videnskabs-Selskabet i Christiania. II. Historisk-filosofisk Klasse (Christiania
[Oslo]: Jacob Dypwad, 1906), 9–10; Kristian Kålund, ed., Den islandske lægebog Codex
Arnamagnæanus 434 a, 12 mo, Den Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskabs Skrifter
(Copenhagen: Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 1907), 8–9.
9 Fabian Schwabe, ed., AM 655 XXX 4to – Ór lǽknisbók. Version 2.2, http://www.menota.
org. Medieval Nordic Text Archive (2020), fol. 2v. All translations in the essay are mine.
10 Kristensen, Harpestræng, 90; Constantine the African, De gradibus quos uocant simplicium
liber, in Constantini Africani post Hippocratem et Galenum … (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1536),
351.
11 See Kristensen, Harpestræng, v; Kålund, Den islandske lægebog, 10.
12 Åslaug Ommundsen and Tuomas Heikkilä, “Piecing Together the Past: The Accidental
Manuscript Collections of the North,” in Nordic Latin Manuscript Fragments: The
Destruction and Reconstruction of Medieval Books, ed. Åslaug Ommundsen and Tuomas
Heikkilä (New York: Routledge, 2017), 4.