Note 606 — Chapter II
Reading edition
Discovered in the seventeenth century in a monastery on an island close by the Icelandic coast, and now in the royal library in Copenhagen. Cf. Laing’s introduction to his edition of the Heimskringla, vol. i. p. 157. Horn says of this codex: “The book was written towards the end of the fourteenth century by two Icelandic priests, and contains in strange confusion and wholly without criticism a large number of sagas, poems, and stories. No other manuscript confuses things on so vast a scale.” Anderson’s translation of Horn’s Lit. of the Scandin. North, p. 60. Cf. Flateyjarbok. En Samling af Norske Konge-Sagaer med indskudte mindre fortællinger om Begivenheder i og Udenfor Norge samt Annaler (Christiania, 1860); and Vigfússon’s and Unger’s edition of 1868, also at Christiania. The best English account of the Codex Flatoyensis is by Gudbrand Vigfússon in the preface to his Icelandic Sagas, published under direction of the Master of the Rolls, London, 1887, vol. i. p. xxv.