Today it is 180 years since a manuscript collection was established within the National Library, today the National and University Library of Iceland. On this day in 1846, King Christian VIII of Denmark (1786–1848) authorised funds to buy the manuscript collection of Valgerður Jónsdóttir (1771–1856), a bishop’s widow, for the Library: 393 volumes in all.
The core of the collection goes back to the scholarly work and the collecting of manuscripts and documents of the Reverend Jón Halldórsson of Hítardalur (1665–1736). His sons, Finnur Jónsson, Bishop of Skálholt (1704–1789), and the Reverend Vigfús Jónsson (1706–1776), added to it, as did Jón’s grandson Hannes Finnsson, Bishop of Skálholt (1739–1796).
Hannes was married to Valgerður Jónsdóttir; after his death she married Steingrímur Jónsson (1769–1845), later Bishop of Iceland. They cared for the collection, which was finally bought for the National Library a year after his death. At that time it consisted mainly of theological, historical and administrative manuscripts, and it was placed in the loft of Reykjavík Cathedral, where the National Library was then housed.
The Manuscript Collection has grown and flourished ever since. It now holds about 15,000 manuscripts and about 2,000 private archives. The great majority of the manuscripts are from later centuries (the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth) and contain a wide variety of material, such as chivalric sagas, sagas of Icelanders, hymns, poems, folk remedies and much else that bears witness to the vigorous manuscript culture of the period, which went hand in hand with the spread of reading and writing among Icelanders.
Today the Manuscript Collection receives on average one or two deliveries a week, mostly private archives. Visitors can look up the holdings on the website handrit.is, which also has images of thousands of manuscripts, and visit the reading room, which is open every weekday from 9:00 to 17:00.
To mark the anniversary, a small exhibition has been set up on the 1st floor of Þjóðarbókhlaða, the library building at Arngrímsgata 3, showing manuscripts, letters and books from the people connected with the original core of the Manuscript Collection in 1846.
