Latnesk grafskrift sem fannst á Þingeyrum sumarið 2022: Greining og samhengi

In 2022, archologists found two corroded copper shields (2022-6-66 and 2022-6-65) at the site of Þingeyrar Cloister in the North of Iceland. The excavation is part of the RANNÍS-funded project „Between Man and Nature. The Making of Benedictine Communities in Medieval Iceland“, directed by Professor Steinunn Kristjánsdóttir at the University of Iceland. The shields were discovered among coffin remains in grave 15, a burial believed to have been located in the floor of the medieval and early-modern wooden churches, which were located about 150 m south of the modern church. X-ray-images revealed a Latin text on one of the shields with a partly illegible memorial inscription for Bjarni Halldórsson (d. 1773), a well-known magistrate in the area and a repesentative of the Danish Crown at Þingeyrar Cloister, who was thereby identified as the owner of grave 15. The author of the article reconstructs the Latin text of the heavily damaged inscription, based on the x-ray-image and a printed document from 1777, showing a representation of a closely related Latin inscription on the tombstone of the same magistrate, which was imported from Denmark by his relatives, but never placed on the grave. The article also refutes as unreliable an anecdote told of a presumed mishap during the magistrate’s burial, which if true would have indicated that he was not buried inside the church but outside in the surrounding graveyard. Finally, two other funeral inscriptions in Latin, which are preserved at the National Museum of Iceland and are roughly contemporary with the newly discovered inscription are transcribed and translated for the first time for comparison.