1. The Skaldic Project and previous lexica poetica
This is not currently part of the peer-reviewed material of the project. Do not cite as a research publication.
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages (The Skaldic Project or SkP), founded in 1997, is supported project no. 60 of the Union Académique Internationale, with funding provided by UK Arts & Humanities Research Council, Australian Research Council, Joint Committee of the Nordic Research Councils for Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and other bodies. SkP is nearing completion: 75% is projected to be published or ready for publication by the time the project starts, with more than 80% available in the database for use by the lexicon project.
SkP was inspired by major problems with previous research, in particular Finnur Jónsson’s edition (1915-18) of the corpus of skaldic poetry (Skj) and the dictionary based on it (2nd ed. 1931). While Skj is a phenomenal work which has provided the foundation for almost a century of skaldic poetry studies, Finnur Jónsson used a heavy hand of intervention, with frequent and silent emendation. His dictionary based on this corpus is therefore founded on a body of material that does not accurately reflect the manuscript evidence. It includes a large number of words that only exist through editorial conjecture, and omits large numbers of words that are evidenced in the manuscript tradition, particularly as manuscript variants are ignored. This situation has left a significant gap in methodologies between the material evidence of the poetic lexicon and the resources to analyse it.
SkP provides the foundation for the current project because it will have reedited the entire corpus based on current philological and textual editing methodologies. The edition is in the form of a digital resource (abdn.ac.uk/skaldic) from which the printed volumes are exported. It links together the normalised, occasionally emended edition with variant readings, manuscripts, secondary literature, prose contexts and previous editions. It includes unnormalised transcriptions of the main manuscripts of the corpus and significant numbers of variant manuscripts. The new resource will be linked directly to these resources, enabling the lexicon to be understood in its complex contexts.
ONP, founded in 1939, is the current state of the art dictionary of Old Norse, covering the corpus of Old Norse prose. It is based at the Department of Nordic Research (Nordisk Forskningsinstitut) at the University of Copenhagen and is the main locus for the skills transfer part of this project. The poetic corpus was specifically excluded from ONP because of the lack of a reliable edition of this material, a lack, as I have pointed out, that has now been addressed by SkP.
ONP has a sophisticated database with a web interface that links the lexicon to the citation index and textual corpus. It uses reliable diplomatic editions and manuscript forms, but is reliant on those editions rather than the manuscripts themselves. This project will build on the lexicographic expertise of ONP and extend its methodologies to connect directly to the material evidence of the corpus.