Um rithendur Ásgeirs Jónssonar

Nokkrar skriftarfræðilegar athugasemdir

Abstract

Ásgeir Jónsson, scribe to Árni Magnússon and Þormóður Torfæus, was the most productive Icelandic scribe of the 17th century. During his long career he employed different calligraphic styles, and the question arises as to the reason behind it. According to Agnete Loth, Ásgeir Jónsson employed a cursive hand in Torfæus’ letters and in a few saga manuscripts, a pseudo-fractura hand in most manuscripts and a third hand, a more ‘parchment-like’ fractura, in 18 manuscripts. New trends in palaeography call for more objectivity in the subdivision of Gothic script into different categories, and therefore a need emerges to redefine Ásgeir Jónsson’s scripts. According to Lieftinck’s system (with Derolez’s adjustment), Ásgeir wrote two scripts, a cursiva hand in the letters and a semi-hybrida in the manuscripts. The latter can be very different from manuscript to manuscript. We need to develop further Lieftinck’s system to accommodate the variety of hands in post-reformation Icelandic manuscripts. According to this further development, Ásgeir Jónsson’s calligraphy in the saga manuscripts can be divided into a chancery-script (kansellískrift) that he used in most manuscripts and a chancery-fractura (kansellíbrotaskrift) in the aforementioned 18 manuscripts (and a few more). Loth proposed that Ásgeir Jónsson used the chancery-fractura to transcribe parchment manuscripts, and the other chancery-script would therefore have been used when transcribing from paper manuscripts. This seems to be incorrect, as Seelow proposed. However, Seelow and Loth assumed that the most formal script was his original, while the less formal chancery-script was supposed to be a later development. This also appears to be incorrect, as Stefán Karlsson demonstrated that he used both scripts in his Copenhagen years between 1686 and 1688. It seems rather that he used the chancery-fractura when transcribing for Árni Magnússon from manuscripts that the collector had little hope to own, otherwise Ásgeir would use the quicker chancery-script. The question of accuracy with one script or the other has not been addressed here, but it seems likely that at least at the beginning of his career in Denmark the slower chancery-fractura could have given him more time to follow the orthography of the original in his copy; increasingly after 1689 he abandoned this script in favour of the quicker one. Though one might assume that the letters written for Torfæus show his natural calligraphy, it should be noted that the script in the four letter-volumes is somewhat influenced by the manuscript hands, as the letters were written after 1688, when he was used to the more formal scripts. One manuscript datable to 1686–88 shows the passage from a cursive hand to Ásgeir’s less formal chancery-hand, and a very untrained one at that. Previously it has been proposed that the first hand was not Ásgeir’s, but it seems possible that the first pages were written in his natural handwriting, and that he was then requested to write in a clearer hand.