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 [ˈmœðrʏˌvɛtlɪr̥], the farm in Eyjafjörður where it was found.[1] In 1628, Magnús Björnsson signed his name in it with the location.[2] 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.[1] Margaret Clunies Ross has asserted that the saga was arranged geographically,[3] and Emily Lethbridge has shown that Njáls saga could have been treated as a separate text from the rest of the extant manuscript.[4]
References
^ abSarah 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, ISBN9781134821389, pp. xi–xv, p. xv, note 1.
^Íslendínga sögur, udgivne efter gamle Haandskrifter af det kongelige nordiske Oldskrift-Selskab, 4 vols., OCLC465745666, Volume 4, ed. Konráð Gíslason and Eiríkur Jónsson, Njála Volume 2, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1889, p. 666(in Danish)
