August 2024:
On (lost) manuscripts, plagiarism and betrayal

The worries and annoyances of bibliophiles and authors were the same in the past as they are today: AM 267 8vo is a lose collection of notes of Árni Magnússon (1663–1730) on individual sagas, collected manuscripts, contents of boxes of books shipped from Iceland, Icelandic historical data etc. The pile of notes was taken over and continued by his assistant Jón Ólafsson úr Grunnavík (1705–1779) after Árni’s death, and this latter part of the notes consists mainly of notes on books that Jón lent to others, but never received back. The lists and complaints on the loss of books span over 30 pages, and is opened by a sarcastic statement: “Slijk eru Bookaskil sumra Studenta Islendskra, þá þeim eru lánaðar Bækur.“ (Such is the mentality of some Icelandic students to return books, when books are loaned to them, AM 267 8vo, f. 230r). 

One particular student is in the epicentre of Jón‘s complaints, Jón Marteinsson (1711–1771), a student at the University of Copenhagen and one of the first to be funded by the Arnamagnæan Legat. Jón Ólafsson even calls Jón Marteinsson a traitor (svikari) on one of the next pages (f. 232r). These strong words are based in particular on two unreturned book-loans: In 1758, Jón Ólafsson borrowed Jón Marteinsson his manuscript of his catalogue of the Arnamagnæan book collection as well as his manuscript of his literary history, both of which the latter did not return, despite repeated urgent requests. What is more, according to f. 247r/v in this collection of notes, Jón Marteinsson presented the catalogue to Geheimraad and book collector Otto Thott (1703–1785). This act of unrightful appropriation or potentially even plagiarism (in the modern sense of the meaning) obviously upset Jón Ólafsson. [1] He meticulously describes how his two manuscripts looked like and what they contained, to prove that they were his works. 

Against this background, it is of particular interest that we today find even three copies of Jón Ólafsson‘s catalogue in Thott‘s collection (Thott 1046, 1047, and 1048 fol.), two of them incomplete, at least one of them written in Jón Marteinsson‘s hand, and one in the hand of Jón Ólafsson. None of these three copies however correspond to Jón Ólafsson‘s material description of his codex on f. 247r/v – but thanks to the detailed rendering this codex can be undoubtedly identified as AM 456 fol.. Thus, in the end, the manuscript obviously made its way back to the author, or at least to the Arnamagnæan Collection. The authorship and textual relationship of the three copies in Thott‘s collection and several other copies in the Arnamagnæan collection, the National Library of Norway and Landsbókasafn in Reykjavík needs to be explored further.

These different versions of the catalogue and Jón Ólafsson’s literary history are under scrutiny in part project 7 “The Notion of Genres in Old Norse Studies: Origins and Diachronic Metaparadigm” within the framework of the DFG-/SNSF-project “Resonating networks”. 

[1]  Jón Ólafsson used the word plagiarius in connection with another ‘book-thief’ one page before (f. 231v)Plagiarius thus not only denotes the unlawful appropriation of a foreign text as one’s own, but also the unlawful appropriation of a foreign book as one’s own.