Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson: Árni Magnússon´s initial collection

Árni Magnússon (1663–1730) was a passionate collector of manuscripts and gathered an immense number of them (over 3000 in all). It can be said that the only manuscripts he did not care about were ritual manuscripts written in Latin, such as psalters and antiphonaries, which could be found everywhere throughout the Catholic part of Europe. All other Icelandic written artefacts were collected with extreme care, no matter the condition and whether it was an entire manuscript or only snippets of parchment. He wrote numerous letters to people throughout the country where he posed questions about manuscripts that he had recently received a fraction of, and asked if more fragments could still be in anyone’s possession. This paper will focus on the collection and condition of the manuscripts when Árni received them, and seeks to answer questions like: How many manuscripts in the collection are fragmentary? How many manuscripts are complete? How many manuscripts are only one leaf, two leaves, and so on? From where did Árni Magnússon get these fragments? The paper will particularly focus on medieval manuscripts in the Árni Magnússon collection.