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The silva portentosa of stemmatology: Bifurcation in the recension of Old Norse manuscripts

After his first edition of the Old French text Lai de l’Ombre in 1890, the Romance scholar Joseph Bedier returned to the text in a revised edition in 1913. In the introduction to this edition, he claimed that he had become aware of a strange law: the great majority of stemmata proposed for Old French texts were bifurcating, i.e. they had two main branches. When he once more returned to this question in 1928, he claimed that of 110 stemmata he had encountered, 105 were bifurcating. Arrigo Castellani, another Romance scholar, revised this material in 1957, and came to somewhat lower numbers, but confirmed in general Bedier’s conclusion—of 86 stemmata, Castellani found that 71 were bifurcating. This article is an investigation into another vernacular tradition, the Old Norse one, i.e. Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. The material presented here is based on the two major series published in Copenhagen, Bibliotheca Arnamagnaeana and Editiones Arnamagnaeanae , and it comes very close to the findings of Castellani—of 89 stemmata, 74 turned out to be bifurcating. The two main hypotheses of Bedier are evaluated, and the conclusion is that the most likely explanation for the preponderance of bifurcating stemmata is the force of dichotomy inherent in the procedure of the stemmatic recension.