To be fair, this is not the project’s official title. But some of my friends jokingly refer to it this way, since they find the whole premise to be more esoteric than anything I’ve done before (which is saying a lot, or so I’m sure they would argue). It also involves Catholicism and the arts, and piecing together fragments of otherwise lost medieval books. All in all, I’m sure there’s a good mystery novel in there somewhere.
In any case, the goal of the project is to locate and properly catalog all the fragments of music manuscripts that survive from Iceland’s Roman Catholic era, i.e. before 1550. Once upon a time, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of music manuscripts of this kind in Iceland, full of plainchant for the mass and office, and also some two-part pieces, since Icelanders were quite good at singing that kind of stuff. But with the Reformation came destruction, and, perhaps more often, indifference. Some of these old and useless manuscripts were burned by overly zealous Lutherans, while others were left to rot. But around 1700, book collectors had begun to realize the value of the old Icelandic manuscripts—that is to say, the ones containing stories and poems in the native language. Church music in Latin was, they believed, completely irrelevant to Icelandic history and culture. In their minds, such leaves, if they had survived at all, served only one reasonable purpose: they made excellent covers and binding for other, more valuable books.
Thus, to the extent that the old Icelandic music manuscripts have survived, they have done so in tiny pieces. A page here, a quarter-page there. Sometimes the parchment has become so dark or worn that one cannot make out more than a few words, or a couple of notes. In the early twentieth century, as librarians began to realize that these fragments told their own valuable story, they removed them and gathered in separate collections. The most important of these, from the books of the Icelandic collector Árni Magnússon, is now preserved in Copenhagen as Accessoria 7. It contains well over 200 fragments that scholars have been able to piece together; they originally belonged to over 50 manuscripts, including a large missal and gradual written by two of Iceland’s most active music scribes in the second half of the fifteenth century.
Yet there are other fragments that have been virtually ignored by scholars, including ones that are still (!!!) found as book-binding material in the Copenhagen Royal Library. Still others have completely escaped the notice of scholars; a few of them are privately owned to this day. Thus, piecing together these fragments is an ongoing project—and, make no mistake about it, a time-consuming and often frustrating one. Trying to decipher what these pages contained, and whether the hand-writing matches one of the other hundreds of fragments out there, in collections in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States, is anything but easy. But, in its own, often annoying, way, it is also fascinating— like a window into a past that was almost lost, but that we are able to painstakingly piece together. And, although the old book collectors didn’t realize it, the information we are able to gather from this tells us much about how the Roman Catholic liturgy was celebrated in Iceland for more than 500 years, including how it was similar to– and how it differed from—the way things were done on the continent. This is the kind of research that will probably never be fully completed—I am sure more fragments will be discovered in the coming decades—but my project is at least a continuation of the work many excellent scholars (including Erik Eggen and Gisela Attinger) have already done in making sense of confusing collections of small fragments that tell a big and fascinating story.
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