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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
The manuscript fragments AM 325 III [alpha] 4 to (two leaves) and AM 598 I[beta] 4to (one leaf) are believed to be all that is left of a mid-fourteenth-century Icelandic codex of otherwise unknown provenance. AM 325 III [alpha] 4 to contains parts of Chapters 28 to 30 and 39 to 42 of Orkneyinga saga; AM 598 I[beta] 4to contains the first part of Mqttuls saga, which the scribe divides into six chapters. The recto of 598 I [beta] is heavily worn and is now largely illegible except under ultraviolet light. 325 III [alpha] 1r and 2V seem to have suffered more moisture damage than wear, leaf 2V more severely, so that even under ultraviolet light lines 4 through 10 inclusive are but for the occasional word nearly indecipherable. A crease in the vellum has also obliterated line 32 of leaf 2V.
Sigurour Nordal's edition of Orkneyinga saga(1) contains the only unnormalized text of 325 III [alpha]. Unfortunately, in Nordal's edition the text of the recto of the first leaf save the last three lines is found only in the critical apparatus, and then only in the form of variant readings where 325 III [alpha] differs from the manuscript on which the passage in question is based, that is, AM 325 I 4to. Until very recently, the complete text of 598 I [beta] was found only in the appendix of the edition by G. Cederschiold and F. A. Wulff.(2) Neither Nordal nor Cederschiold and Wulff were able to benefit from ultraviolet photography in preparing their editions, as did Marianne Kalinke, in her recent edition of Mottuls saga;(3) here the text of 598 I[beta] runs parallel to the text of the main manuscript, AM 179 fol.
The fragments themselves have been dated 1300, but Kalinke believes that a later date is more likely.(4) As proof she cites the presence of palatalization of /g/ before /ae/ (and by extension before other front vowels), which "does not become common until the middle of the fourteenth century."(5) The presence of "bar-z," that is, z with a horizontal stroke through the ascender, may also serve to indicate a later date.(6)
Another development that is reflected in the orthography of these fragments is, as one would expect, the unrounding of OIc /oe/ (i.e., the reflex of the i-umlaut of /o/) and merger with /ae/. Although this change was probably completed by the latter half of the thirteenth century, the orthographic system was slow to catch up.(7) By the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, we find manuscripts in which the reflexes of both /oe/ and /ae/ are consistently written with variants of and , and not with the graphs used for the new /o/ that arose from the merger of /o/ and /phi/ in the "short" vowel system (when /phi/ had not already undergone delabialization and merged with /e/). This latter merger is believed to precede the former "by about half a century."(8) Both mergers are illustrated in Table (1):
long/tense short/lax "Early" Old Icelandic: /ae/ /oe/ /e/ /phi/ /o/ "Late" Old Icelandic:...
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