Eine deutsche Zusammenfassung von Njáls saga im Manuskript Rostock Mss. philol. 78/2

The manuscript Mss. philol. 78/2 is one of five Islandica that are stored in the University Library in Rostock/Germany. The manuscript was described by Tröger (1995) and contains texts in Latin, Icelandic, Swedish and German, mostly copies, translations and summaries of texts concerned with Scandinavian history, dated to the 17th and 18th century. It was originally in the possession of Adolf Friedrich von Bassewitz, a nobleman from Mecklenburg. Pages 873 to 881 of the manuscript contain a summary of Njál’s Saga in German with a number of citations from an Icelandic original. A transcription of this summary is contained in this article. Palaeographic and linguistic features of the text indicate that it was written between ca. 1650 and 1750 by a professional German scribe who had no knowledge of Icelandic. A comparison of one of the longer Icelandic citations in all surviving manuscripts of Njál’s saga was able to show that the source of the Icelandic citations is most likely the manuscript Isl. papp. fol. nr 9 which is stored in the Royal Library in Stockholm and was produced in 1684 by the Icelander Jón Vigfússon for the Swedish College of Antiquities (Antikvitetskollegiet). The scribe of Rostock Mss. philol. 78/2 apparently copied the Icelandic parts letter by letter, but obviously not from the Icelandic original. Certain spellings in the Icelandic citations suggest that his direct exemplar was written in Swedish. A Swedish summary and a Swedish translation, both stored in the Royal Library in Stockholm (Isl. papp. fol. nr 96 and 93) and originally in the possession of the Swedish Archive of Antiquities (Antikvitetsarkivet, the successor institution of the College of Antiquities), can be ruled out as exemplars for the Rostock manuscript for textual and chronological reasons. Another Swedish summary of Njál’s Saga was produced by Eric Julius Biörner, translator at the Archive of Antiquities, between 1720 and 1730 but is now lost. As a colonel (överste) in the army of Swedish king Charles XII and Swedish baron ...