Gripla - 2023, Qupperneq 248

246 GRIPLA
1657–1733), who had grown up at Munkaþverá, recognised the book and
told Árni Magnússon that AM 232 fol. had belonged to his father Björn; he
thought that Sveinn must have found it in some chest in the former mon-
astery complex (AM 435 a 4to, 9v–10r). The presence of Barlanus saga in
the 1525 inventory is evidence that this codicological unit had belonged to
Munkaþverá since before the Reformation. However, only the codicologi-
cal unit containing Framför Maríu could be hypothesised to have been writ-
ten at Munkaþverá and kept there for the duration of its pre-Reformation
history, as other sections of the manuscript predate the 1429 fire.9
Guðbrandur informed Árni that his father taught him to read using
AM 232 fol. (AM 435 a 4to, 9v–10r). Helga and her siblings too might
have been given this manuscript for reading practice: a large vellum manu-
script with generous margins would have been a durable reading primer.
The manuscript shows signs of use for beginner writing practice: traces
of a beginner writer’s pen-strokes are visible in the outer margin on f. 22v.
Other marginalia include rows of letters on ff. 5v and 30r.
According to a note by Árni Magnússon in AM 645 4to, Guðbrandur
Björnsson remembered that a very old vellum manuscript containing
sagas of apostles had been at Munkaþverá in his childhood, which Árni
identified as AM 645 4to. Guðbrandur claimed that only one man in
Eyjafjörður had been able to read it. The smaller manuscript’s provenance
is difficult to verify, as Árni neglects to mention where or from whom he
acquired it, but Árni seems confident in his statement. AM 645 4to con-
tains Jarteinabók Þorláks biskups, Clemens saga, Péturs saga postola, Jakobs
saga post ola, Bartholomeus saga postola, Matheus saga postola, Andreas saga
postola, Páls saga postola, Niðurstigningar saga and Martinus saga biskups.
The book was likely monastic property before it circulated among a secular
9 On Framför Maríu and the provenance of this manuscript, see Bullitta 2021. Bullitta sug-
gests that some sixteenth-century names in the manuscript may have belonged to Helga’s
paternal ancestors and that AM 232 fol. was kept at the former monastery at Möðruvellir
in Hörgárdalur before the Reformation. While this may be correct, the names in ques-
tion (Björn, Benedikt, Sigurður Jónsson and a priest named Jón) are common enough
that secure identification is impossible, nor is the presence of names in marginalia always
equivalent to ownership: long-term borrowing of manuscripts was common. After several
generations at Munkaþverá, boundaries between family and monastery property were
blurred. Guðbrandur, an evidently unbookish child who enrolled in the Danish army rather
than the University of Copenhagen, believed that his father owned the book, but Björn
presumably left it at Munkaþverá because he did not view it as his property.