2. About Medieval Manuscripts

This register lists the datings adopted by ONP for manuscripts or parts of manuscripts from before c. 1550 that contain Old Norse prose. It also names the collections that contain diplomas and post-medieval manuscripts referred to by ONP.
In principle the foliation or pagination is that of the catalogues. In cases where a catalogue gives foliation but the manuscript itself contains only pagination, both numerations are registered (with the pagination in brackets). This principle is very occasionally waived, where a facsimile edition or standard edition has established an alternative practice. GKS 1005 fol forms an exception in that column numbers alone are given. Mutilated scraps of manuscripts are wherever possible registered as parts of reconstructed leaves and numbered as such. Foliation is distinguished from pagination by the addition of r/v for recto and verso; numbers without r/v therefore indicate pagination; a/b denote the left and right-hand columns of a two-columned manuscript page.
Indications as to a manuscript's national provenance are given as follows: manuscripts which are considered to be Norwegian are marked no., while fær. indicates Faroese provenance; no./isl.? means that the manuscript is most probably Norwegian, whereas isl./no.? indicates that a manuscript is most probably Icelandic but that Norwegian origin cannot be ruled out. Stefán Karlsson has acted as ONP's consultant on the issue of provenance.
Each dating is accompanied by a selection of bibliographical references. The first reference is to the earliest presentation (from c. 1850 onwards) recorded by ONP of the dating in question. If this dating was put forward a long time ago, later supporting references are added.
ONP has often interpreted and simplified the statements in the secondary literature. All datings that scholars have not expressed in terms of exact years such as ‘1469’ or ‘1520-1538’ are printed with the prefix c = circa (very occasionally a = ante or p = post), but scholarly reservations expressed by ‘possibly’, ‘probably’ are not otherwise represented. ONP has, for example, interpreted ‘the first half/part of the 13th century’ as c1200-1250, ‘the 14th century’ as c1300-1400, and the expression ‘the end of the fourteenth century’ or ‘late fourteenth-century’ as c1375-1400. Where it has been necessary to extract a conclusion from an indirect presentation, the reference is introduced by cf.
The datings of the standard catalogues are given in the final column; this is done partly to present the datings that most scholars in this century have referred to, and partly as a counterbalance to the often rather narrow datings adopted by ONP.
The bibliographical references in italics are explained in full in the bibliography.

Click here to open Medieval Manuscripts.

References