At the beginning of January the Manuscript Collection received 94 manuscripts as a donation. They contain rímur (Icelandic narrative verse), chivalric sagas and later legendary sagas, most of them written between about 1870 and 1910, but some are older.
The collection shows the hands of various well-known scribes, such as Níels skáldi Jónsson (1782–1857), Gísli Konráðsson (1787–1877) and Björn Sveinsson (1844–1932). The names of earlier owners and their notes in the margins are also found in many places.
The manuscripts originally came from the collection of Bjarnhéðinn Jónsson (1876–1920), a blacksmith in Reykjavík. Bjarnhéðinn ran a smithy at Aðalstræti 6B, which he had bought from his master, Sigurður Jónsson from Hliðsnes (1843–1935). It was also the home of Bjarnhéðinn and his wife, Guðrún Jónsdóttir (1868–1947), and their two daughters. Bjarnhéðinn died at only 44, and Markús Ívarsson (1884–1943) and Bjarni Þorsteinsson (1897–1938) then bought the workshop from his widow and named it Héðinn in his memory. The company is still in business today.
Bjarnhéðinn was a great lover of books and a book collector, and he owned a large collection of rímur, printed and unprinted, as well as chivalric sagas and later legendary sagas, some of it written in his own hand.
Two years after Bjarnhéðinn’s death the National Library acquired nine manuscripts from his estate (Lbs 1935–1936 4to and Lbs 2079–2087 8vo). In 2000 the Manuscript Collection received a further ten manuscripts from Bjarnhéðinn’s collection, from Blindravinafélagið (the Friends of the Blind society). They had come to the society from Fríða Bjarnhéðinsdóttir (1908–1994) and her husband Tómas Jónsson (1910–1996), a master plumber; Fríða was the daughter of Bjarnhéðinn and Guðrún. Fríða and Tómas had no children and had left their estate to the society. Those manuscripts now have the shelfmarks Lbs 5540–5543 4to and Lbs 4842–4847 8vo. It is worth adding that the printed books from Bjarnhéðinn’s collection formed the original core of Reykjavík City Library, which bought them in 1922, when it was called Alþýðubókasafn Reykjavíkur (Reykjavík Public Library).
Now, just over 100 years after Bjarnhéðinn’s death, a large part of his manuscript collection has thus been reunited in the Manuscript Collection of the National and University Library of Iceland. The next step is to catalogue the manuscripts on handrit.is. The Library is grateful for this generous donation and reminds readers that it gladly accepts manuscripts and private papers, now as always, and catalogues and preserves them for use and research.