by Ragnheiður Mósesdóttir

Margaret and Richard Beck Lectures
University of Victoria
Article by Leif Nordholm
June 20, 2007

Ragnheiður Mósesdóttir is the librarian at the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen. As she admitted, at the beginning of her talk, the name of her institute is a real mouthful and is sometimes confused with Armageddon. An observation that provoked chuckles in the audience.

Probably Árni Magnússon (1663–1730), from whose name the Latin adjective was constructed, never worried about the Last Battle, if he thought about the institution he hoped to endow. But maybe he did think of a scholarly millennium, a golden age of scientific editions. In any case, like the scholars of his age, he thought that the readers of these editions would know Latin.

So he left all his money to pay for editions of the sagas and other Old Icelandic works. A Commission was established, whose task was to produce one edition every other year—a target they had a hard time meeting. He was also fairly annoyed by people who had some fantastic ideas of what the Old North had been like. He thought good editions would help.

Árni Magnússon, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, was born in Iceland in 1663. After his primary education, he went to Copenhagen to study theology. His main interest, however, was the old language and literature of the country of his birth.

According to Ragnheiður, a turning point in his life came in the year 1702, and he was appointed commissioner to go to Iceland to look at the state of the Icelandic nation. Árni spent ten years in Iceland investigating the state of the country.

In the year he arrived, he conducted the first extant universal census of any country in the world. Though there had been a census taken in other regions of the world, this was the first to occur on a national level.

He was also able to follow his own passion. As a second part of his stay there, he collected manuscripts and he gathered the largest extant collection of Old Norse manuscripts that we now have. Árni eagerly shipped his collection to Copenhagen.

In 1712, he went back to Copenhagen and began working on his manuscripts. There was a devastating fire in Copenhagen sixteen years later that destroyed many of the printed books in his collection. Luckily, Árni saved most of the manuscripts from the fire, but as Ragnheiður dolefully announced, he was a broken man afterwards. Two years later, he died.

Árni donated all of his books and money to the University of Copenhagen. His intention was that students would copy texts to make them available and ready for publication.

In 1760, a charter was written in order to carry out Árni’s final wishes. A Commission was created. Two trustees were appointed, and under them, two students were granted funding to initiate Árni’s bequest, a program that exists to this day. Despite their labours the editions were slow in coming, which is perhaps not surprising given the difficulties involved in editing.

Nonetheless, the members of the Arnamagnæan Commission were determined to bring this project to fruition. The initial idea in 1772 was to publish a work about the history of the Christianization of Iceland or some such small pamphlet. And they were determined that this edition should not have the appearance of the editions of the seventeenth century, which aimed to look like manuscripts—including marginal notes.

The primary concern of the Commission’s guidelines was layout, not content. They wanted to use a roman-style typeface and to include a Latin translation, because their learned audience would not necessarily understand the Northern languages. They decided to use the octavo format, that is to produce books of middling size.

Where does the name octavo come from? Ragnheiður asked this question to the audience during the lecture. After seeing our blank expressions, she revealed the secret. Octavo refers to the way that paper is folded. Whereas quarto is a folding technique that produces four leaves, or individual pieces of paper, octavo produces eight.

Ragnheiður showed an image of an edition of Kristni saga, The History of the Christianization of Iceland, which was the first edition published by the Commission in 1772. Its format is called large octavo, which means that a larger size of paper was used.

There were three reasons that the Commission may have decided to publish Kristni saga rather than, for instance, a family saga or a kingsʼ saga. First of all, Kristni saga was quite short, and the Commission needed to produce an edition that year to comply with the charter. Second, Bishop Finnur Jónsson, whose son was the secretary of the Commission, had been writing a Latin history of the church in Iceland and they wanted to publish a complimentary edition. Finally, it seemed logical at that period to start with religious sagas, then move to kingsʼ sagas and family sagas.

As a lovely conclusion to this evening lecture, Ragnheiður showed us different engravings of Árni Magnússon. They were all based on the same portrait, but were very different interpretations. One engraving imagined Árni as a Roman bust, or as Ragnheiður put it, Árni like Homer, on a pedestal. Another interpretation gave Árni a stern, solemn look. The image she concluded with was from the title page of an edition of Plácidus saga: Árni with a warm, friendly look.

The question I was left with at the end of the evening: Who was the real Árni Magnússon?