Heilög Anna birtist Árna Magnússyni undir andlátið

Abstract

Saga heilagrar Önnu was recently edited by Kirsten Wolf and published by the Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi. The Icelandic version is a translation of a Low German legend of St. Anne printed in Braunschweig in the year 1507. The legend is preserved in two manuscripts; AM 238 fol III, which is a fragment consisting only of two leaves, and AM 82 8vo. The latter is made up of 112 leaves, but is defective towards the end, with approximately one third of the miracle section missing. AM 238 fol III was written by a scribe working under the auspices of the lawman Ari Jónsson in the second quarter of the 16th century. The aim of this paper is to throw some light upon the provenance and history of AM 82 8vo, of which little is known. In the paper the last owner of the manuscript, before it came into the hands of Árni Magnússon, is identified as the lawman Benedikt fiorsteinsson. From a biographical sketch drawn up of Benedikt it is deduced that the likliest place for him to have acquired the manuscript was at the former monastery of Munkaflverá. He became the administrator of Munkaflverá in 1721, and from a letter written there on the 23rd of December 1722 he mentions the manuscript. It is clear from an inventory dated 1525 that there was a chapel dedicated to St. Anne in the monastery of Munkaflverá. It is therefore highly probable that it had in its possession a manuscript containing the legend of St. Anne. The manuscript which Benedikt gave Árni Magnússon was a copy made in the first half of the 17th century from a worn vellum manuscript which had lost some leaves towards the end. The scribe of AM 82 8vo had space to carry on, but his exemplar did not permit him to go any further.