Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 266
264 GRIPLA
Þorbjarnardóttir, was born in 1671), and Helga Magnúsdóttir may have
known her personally. AM 146 b I 8vo came from the Rev. Gísli Álfsson
(1653–1725) and is the only known surviving copy of Hyndlu rímur.24
Given that Árni Magnússon felt that Þórdís’s manuscript preserved a
poor copy of the text, it is reasonable to assume that he discarded it after
receiving what he felt was a superior manuscript. It is impossible to
determine whether Þórdís’s copy had previously belonged to the family at
Bræðratunga (like AM 608 4to) or was Þórdís’s own.
The mechanics of an early modern Icelandic library
With a few exceptions, such as the libraries of the cathedrals at Hólar and
Skálholt and the fabled library of Brynjólfur Sveinsson, described nostalgi-
cally by Jón Halldórsson (1665–1736) in his Biskupa sögur, private libraries
in seventeenth-century Iceland appear to have been comparatively small.25
Pearson’s (2012, 2021) research on private book ownership in seventeenth-
century England suggests that the average private library for which data
on size survives held over a thousand books at the century’s beginning and
over three thousand by its end. The proliferation of printed titles readily
available to reading audiences in larger book markets was not matched in
Iceland, where the publication of new vernacular titles was limited to a sin-
gle press at a given time and output fluctuated (cf. Halldór Hermannsson
1916, 1922). Theology in a broad sense (Bibles, hymnals, prayer books,
house postils, catechisms and devotional books as well as titles intended
for a narrower readership of trained theologians) was and remained the
most represented subject area.26 Pearson’s (2010) observation that early
modern libraries in England were typically multilingual and contained a
high proportion of classical and patristic writings but comparatively few
24 On Steinunn Finnsdóttir and her poetry, see Hughes 2014.
25 According to Jón Halldórsson (1903–1915, vol. 1, 289), Bishop Brynjólfur kept “sitt góða
bibliothek” (‘his good library’) in the Skálholt cathedral.
26 This was still true of private Icelandic libraries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, cf. Sólrún Jensdóttir 1974–1977. Probate records, which have been researched
extensively by Már Jónsson, are an increasingly important source on book ownership in
the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as are parish ministers’ records on house-
hold ownership of core religious texts. However, it is probable that a person’s private
manuscripts were frequently omitted from probate records (a person’s correspondence and
personal papers were not included in such records).