2. Major Outcomes of the General Editors’ meeting
This is not currently part of the peer-reviewed material of the project. Do not cite as a research publication.
12 and 14 April 2002 at the King’s Manor, University of York
This a summary of the major issues discussed and decisions taken at the
annual meeting of the general editors of the skaldic project. There were
present: Margaret Clunies Ross (MCR, in the chair), Kari Gade (KG), Edith
Marold (EM), Guñrún Nordal (GN), Valgerñur Ãorvaldsdóttir
(VÃ, Research Assistant to Guñrún Nordal), Diana
Whaley (DW) and Tarrin Wills (TW, Research Associate for the electronic
edition).
Area G, Runic Poems
This item was discussed on Sunday 14 April, after many of the issues arising had been aired at the Saturday 13 symposium and EM had presented the runic corpus and discussed possible criteria for inclusion/exclusion at the symposium.
It was decided:
• to include ALL material in the runic corpus that could be identified
as metrical, and all material of East Norse as well as West Norse provenance;
• to use the layout of the runic material as presented by EM in a tabled
document, viz. Introduction; context; reading; meaning (text normalised
to Old Swedish or Old Norwegian rather than Old Icelandic); edition(s);
prose word order; translation; notes.
A separate decision was made, after Ray Page’s presentation at the Symposium, to include both the Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems in the edition (Finnur Jónsson included only the Norwegian poem).
Report from TW concerning the electronic and web-based material for the edition
• TW gave a verbal report on his progress so far, and noted that he had
now entered all 8 boxes of the Jón Helgason card indices at the
Arnamagnæan Institute, Copenhagen, into the database. He had now obtained
approximately 7000 images of manuscripts, c. 5000 scanned by himself and
the others from online resources such as Saganet etc. He foreshadowed that
he would have to make at least one other trip to Copenhagen, probably about
the time of the next saga conference in Bonn in July 2003. Outstanding mss
in Reykjavík which have not yet been scanned have been listed and
Vésteinn Ólason has promised to get their scanning/photography
underway.
There are also mss in other libraries, especially the Royal Library, Stockholm,
as well as Uppsala University Library, various Norwegian collections,
Wolfenbüttel, the British Library and the National Library of Scotland,
Edinburgh.
He also indicated that files containing the ONP database would be sent
to him in Sydney, so that this could be made available on the skaldic
website.
The general editors congratulated TW on the remarkable progress he had made and with the excellence of the database.
• There was a full discussion of TW’s tabled paper on Guidelines for the electronic edition of the skaldic corpus. See further items 3 and 4 below.
Bibliographical Guidelines
This item was discussed both at the symposium, after MCR had made a short presentation, and at the Sunday 14 April editors’ meeting. Most of the points raised in this item and agreed to by the general editors will appear in the new edition of the Editors’ Manual (see item 4 below).
With reference to bibliographical material, which is to be compiled by EM and her assistants at Kiel and will appear, along with indices, in a separate final volume of the edition, contributing editors should be able to enter their material directly into the database using standardised software. Further details concerning this process will be advised.
Plans for the period 2003-4 and beyond
Discussion about this crucial period focused on the following issues:
• the importance of determining what is lacking still re ms images and
needs to be scanned >TW
• information of various kinds to go to the editors and reminders of what
they have to do in the period 2002-3-4 to go out to all contributing
editors within the next couple of months via the first number of the Newsletter
(see further item 5 below).
• revision of the Editors’ Manual (see item 4 below).
Plans for publication
MCR gave a report on various explorations with publishers who may be interested in our product, both electronic and hard copy. We are now close to a binding agreement with one of these publishers, who will be able to handle both the hard copy and electronic edition, and we expect to be able to inform all editors of the situation within the next few months. We will issue a special announcement on this matter as soon as possible.
Funding and support issues
GN has obtained an NOS-H grant of SKr. 450,000 for 3 years (with a possible
1-2 years’ renewal and the possibility of a publication grant at the
end). This will be used for editorial and transcription work (especially
the employment of Vfi), travel grants and the holding of symposia. GN will
shortly contact all editors with information about how they may be able
to access some of this funding.
DW has had an award of £2000 from the British Academy’s collaborative
international projects fund for the York meeting and symposium. She has
applied for a grant of £11,000 from the MHRA for a Research Associate
to assist her with work on the kings’ sagas.
MCR has been awarded $Australian 589,026 over 5 years (2002-6) by the
Australian Research Council for the skaldic project and a couple of her
other research projects. She will be able to employ TW as Research Associate
over this period, and pay for other items of project-related expenditure,
including her own and Tarrin’s travel, costs of photography and scanning
of mss etc.
At its annual meeting in Beijing in May 2001, MCR proposed to the Union
académique internationale (a Humanities peak body based in Brussels)
that the skaldic project should become one of those major international
research projects in the Humanities that they sponsor, and this was agreed
to. It is now project no. 60. Aside from the international recognition
this gives, it may be possible to apply for modest funding through the
UAI in the future.
Specific editorial issues and problems arising from sample edited verses
A number of issues came up under these heads, most of which will be dealt with in the revised edition of the Editors’ Manual. We would like to mention a couple of them in this Newsletter, where they appear under item 5.
Date and place of the next general editors’ meeting and symposium
The next general editors’ meeting will take place at Kiel, either just before or just after the 12th International Saga Conference at the University of Bonn, 28 July 2003-3 August 2003. There will be an accompanying symposium, which we cordially invite all editors to attend. The symposium title will be: ‘Reconstruction and Deconstruction of Skaldic Poems’. EM will organise the meeting and further information will be sent out when the actual dates have been decided.
MCR has indicated to Rudy Simek that we wish to have a presentation at Bonn on the skaldic edition with special emphasis on the electronic side, and he has indicated that he would be happy to have one in the Projects Workshop, as well of course, as any individual papers that editors may wish to offer.
Margaret Clunies Ross