Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða - Complete Lemmatised Reading Edition
Project Idea
The idea for this project developed from a reading course for which the participants had prepared themselves with the help of grammars and dictionaries in order to be able to translate the individual sentences into German correctly, both factually and linguistically. It is not easy, especially for beginners, to keep track of the formal variety of Old Norse words, which can differ greatly in form from the dictionary entry due to various sound changes.
Originally, the preparations of the individual participants were to be used to completely open up the rather short text of the Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða grammatically, in order to give a reader enough help that he or she can master and understand the text on his or her own. The aim was to create a digital reading edition of the saga. The starting text was the edition by Guðni Jónsson (1945), which is available as a digital text on heimskringla.no.
It quickly became apparent that an exact grammatical determination was much more time-consuming than preparing for a meeting. The preliminary result was sobering: complete determination of the first two chapters by seminar participants and a large number of partial determinations saved in an XML file. On the plus side, there was a ready-made workflow for generating a website based on the XML-encoded grammatical information.
Linking to External Sources
Further grammatical determination and verification of preliminary work was carried out with major interruptions from March 2016 onwards. Since 21 March 2017, the entire text has been grammatically determined that a link to the external sources could be placed. The normalisation of the text follows the guidelines of the Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog (ONP).
The text is displayed on the website chapter by chapter. Some special features of Old Norse, such as enclitic personal pronouns or multi-word conjunctions, are highlighted in grey and, when the mouse cursor is moved over them, translation aids are provided. For each word, more detailed grammatical information can be displayed in an extra window by clicking on it. From there, the reader can look at the entries in the digitally edited dictionaries by Cleasby/Vigfusson (1874) or Fritzner (1883-96) as well as at the grammars by Noreen (1923) or Haugen (2015). All three external sources are linked in such a way that the reader is taken directly to the relevant page.
The Backend
The technical implementation is based on XML. A strict schema minimises erroneous entries in the lemma setting and grammatical determination in the XML document, which in turn has been transformed into a website using XSL-T. The XML encoding and the encoding of the grammatical information is based on the encoding suggestions of the Medieval Nordic Text Archive, which was developed for the encoding of medieval manuscript material. For the presentation of the website, Bootstrap, some customised style sheets and a few JavaScript or jQuery functions were used.