__NOTOC__ Möðruvallabók () or AM 132 fol is an Icelandic manuscript from the mid-14th century, inscribed on vellum. It contains the following Icelandic sagas in this order:
Njáls saga Egils saga Finnboga saga ramma Bandamanna saga Kormáks saga Víga-Glúms saga Droplaugarsona saga Ölkofra þáttr Hallfreðar saga Laxdœla saga Bolla þáttr Bollasonar Fóstbrœðra saga
Many of those sagas are preserved in fragments elsewhere but are only found in their full length in Möðruvallabók, which contains the largest known single repertoire of Icelandic sagas of the Middle Ages.
The manuscript takes its name from Möðruvellir , the farm in Eyjafjörður where it was found.Sarah M. Anderson, "Introduction: 'og eru köld kvenna ráð'", Cold Counsel: The Women in Old Norse Literature and Myth, ed. Sarah M Anderson and Karen Swenson, 2000, e-book ed. Hoboken, New Jersey: Taylor and Francis, 2013, , pp. xi–xv, p. xv, note 1. In 1628, Magnús Björnsson signed his name in it with the location.Íslendínga sögur, udgivne efter gamle Haandskrifter af det kongelige nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab, 4 vols., , Volume 4, ed. Konráð Gíslason and Eiríkur Jónsson, Njála Volume 2, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1889, p. 666 It was brought to Denmark in 1684 by Magnús Björnsson's son Björn, who gifted it to Thomas Bartholin. Árni Magnússon acquired the manuscript in 1691 after Bartholin's death, and it was incorporated into the Arnamagnæan Collection. It was returned to Iceland in 1974 after the collection's division into an Icelandic and a Danish section. Margaret Clunies Ross has asserted that the saga was arranged geographically,Margaret Clunies Ross, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse Icelandic Saga, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, p. 144. and Emily Lethbridge has shown that Njáls saga could have been treated as a separate text from the rest of the extant manuscript.Emily Lethbridge. "„Hvorki glansar gull á mér/né glæstir stafir í línum." Arkiv för nordisk filologi 129 (2014): 53-89.
The manuscript is bound with two pieces of oak wood, has 200 parchment pages, and is 33.5 x 22 cm. Parts of Njals saga, Egils saga, and Fóstbræðra saga are missing from it. Initially, the manuscript was at least 27 volumes long, with all volumes having eight pages except for the last one, which had possibly only six pages. In the early 1930s, a facsimile of it was published by Ejnar Munksgaard.
References
External links Images of manuscripts at the Árni Magnússon Institute site (Möðruvallabók is the second from the top in the list) Best quality images at handrit.is Text in Icelandic at the Árni Magnússon Institute site Entry at Sagnanet Árni Magnússon and the Collecting of Icelandic Manuscripts
Further reading Bjarni Einarsson. "Um Möðruvallabók". Tíminn, 17 June 1965, p. 25