ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with Latin manuscript fragments from the Middle Ages related to Iceland, focusing on fragments preserved in Iceland or which were once in Iceland. Many hundreds of the manuscript fragments that Arni Magnusson collected later seem to have belonged to intact books as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century. The discovery and cataloguing of book fragments represent an essential first step in the study of the manuscript culture of the past. Since the Latin fragments in Iceland represent less than 200 manuscripts, and the Latin fragments in the Arnamagnaean Collection in Copenhagen represent 144 manuscripts, there are combined remnants of roughly 340 Latin manuscripts, liturgical and others. In addition comes a far lower number of manuscripts in other collections. It seems fairly safe to say that the fragments held in collections in Iceland and other countries only provide a small taste of what once existed in the medieval churches and ecclesiastical institutions in Iceland.