A. General objective of the project
This is not currently part of the peer-reviewed material of the project. Do not cite as a research publication.
The general objective of the project Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages is to produce a new edition of the known corpus of Norse-Icelandic skaldic poetry, including runic inscriptions in metrical form. In practice this means that we are editing all known poetry from that supposed earliest until c. 1400 and which does not belong to the Codex Regius of the Elder Edda and manuscripts containing related texts, such as AM 748 I 4°.
The edition will appear in book and electronic form. We do not intend to follow the format of Finnur Jónsson’s Den norsk-islandske skjaldedigtning A and B (1912-15), currently regarded as the standard edition of the skaldic corpus, with separate volumes of diplomatic and critical editions. The new work will be a critical edition with an English translation, which will, however, in all cases re-examine the manuscript evidence for the poetic texts and their locations. To facilitate this process a data bank of photographs of the manuscripts is in an advanced stage of assembly and is available on the project web site for editors to work from. As it is planned to issue the edition in electronic format as well as hard copy, we have sought permission to scan relevant images of major manuscripts from photographs for use in the electronic version of the edition. For the most part we will record images of the lines containing the skaldic verses alone and not whole folios of the manuscripts in which the poems or verses occur. These images will be available in the edition’s electronic format, together with transcriptions, but will not appear in the printed edition.