Gripla - 2023, Page 267

THE LIBRARY AT BRÆÐRATUNGA 265
literary titles would likely also have been true of learned Icelanders’ librar-
ies. However, a library such as Helga’s was not built through commercial
transactions with booksellers.
In contrast to the stationary nature of manuscript use within archives,
where manuscripts’ movements are tightly regulated and monitored, in-
tact manuscripts in early modern Iceland appear as objects on the move.
Practices of reading aloud to households from literary manuscripts meant
that such manuscripts were widely in demand among scholars and non-
scholars alike, and regular exchange of manuscripts between households
enabled fewer manuscripts to cover greater ground and reach a larger
readership. In such an environment, not everyone needed a private copy
of every saga or romance title. Manuscripts belonged to a culture of active
circulation: borrowing and lending across physical distances.27 Within
this context, the outright gift of a manuscript was a deeply meaningful act.
The marginalia on f. 1r of AM 61 fol. includes an inscription from an
anonymous borrower, thanking both the person who had lent the book
and the person who read it aloud and wishing pleasure to the listener
(“Haf[e] sa heidur er liede, sa soma sem las, sa glede er hlidde, vale”).
There is also a warning at the top of the same leaf to return the book in
good condition (“Heilu läne skal huør aptur skila”). This is remarkably
similar to the conditions of use for books in a modern lending library
and provides evidence for the informal networks within which books
circulated, which often left few material traces. While manuscripts had
owners, and ownership could be transferred between individuals, they
should not be understood as items constantly present at a given household.
Möðruvallabók circulated extensively within scholarly circles in Iceland
while in Magnús’s library (Sigurjón Páll Ísaksson 1994, 147–149). The
same was true of *Bræðratungubók and probably other items in Helga’s
library at Bræðratunga during her lifetime.
27 On early modern Icelandic manuscript culture, see Davíð Ólafsson 2010. As an example
of how manuscripts could be borrowed across vast physical distances, the Rev. Eyjólfur
Jónsson of Vellir (1670–1745) mentions in a note in AM 569 c 4to (2r) that his grandmother
Björg Ólafsdóttir (c. 1617–1690) had heard the sagas contained in two vellum manuscripts
that her parents at Breiðabólstaður in Vesturhóp borrowed for three years from Ögur in
the Westfjords. The manuscripts had been lent in turn to Ögur by Gísli Hákonarson of
Bræðratunga, Helga’s father-in-law. Björg moved to Hólar as an adult in the early 1640s,
where she married Rev. Sveinn Jónsson (1603–1687). She and Helga may thus have known
each other.