Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 218
216 GRIPLA
book was valued as a functional tool. Furthermore, the compact size of the
leaves (octavo) suggests that the original codex was crafted to be portable.
The above indicates that the manuscript was considered both practical and
important, and that its purpose was to be carried around as a handbook
and used in practice.
The other five manuscripts
For the purpose of comparison, the other five manuscripts will be briefly
described. The fragment AM 696 I 4to is the second oldest of the six, dated
to c. 1350.31 Its importance lies in its status as evidence of an Old Norse
translation of Henrik Harpestræng’s herbal pharmacology, with a possible
Norwegian source text which is no longer extant as an intermediary.32 It
consists of two leaves from two different parts of a manuscript, of which
the rest is now lost. The leaves are very damaged, apparently from being
used in a binding, and the text is illegible in places. It appears to have once
been an elegant manuscript; it is of quarto size, and each article starts with
a pen-flourished initial in colour (and partly in gold, Marius Hægstad
contends),33 but now very faded. The text is written in a single column
and the plants are listed in an alphabetical order, followed by long clauses,
about 100–200 words each, on their effects. Hægstad argues, on the
grounds of orthography and language, that the fragment was written in
northwest Norway.34 Stefán Karlsson, on the other hand, points out that
this demonstrates only that it was “possibly copied from a Norwegian ex-
emplar” and is just as likely to be of Icelandic origin.35 Marginalia indicate
that the manuscript was in Iceland in the seventeenth century.36 The text
was published with an introduction in Norwegian by Hægstad in 1906.37
The medical text in AM 673 a II 4to is in the plainest format of all six.
31 Stefán Karlsson, ed., Sagas of Icelandic Bishops: Fragments of Eight Manuscripts in the
Arnamagnæan Collection (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1967), 52; Hægstad,
Gamalnorsk fragment, 15–16.
32 Hægstad, Gamalnorsk fragment, 9–10.
33 Ibid., 1.
34 Ibid., 10–12.
35 Stefán Karlsson, Sagas of Icelandic Bishops, 52.
36 Fol. 2r: “Þetta kuer a eg Biorn pettuʀ Son med ʀiettu | Anno 1692”. See Kristian Kålund,
Katalog II, 110. Árni Magnússon acquired the fragment from north-Iceland.
37 Hægstad, Gamalnorsk fragment.