The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 10

As usual, here's the answer to the previous riddle:

"Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar. Þar fara svanbrúðir til hreiðrs síns ok verpa eggjum; skurm á eggi er eigi höndum gert né hamri klappat, en svanr er fyrir eyjar utan örðigr, sá er þær gátu eggin við."

"Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi, but I have guessed it. Swan-maids* go to their nests and lay eggs; the shell of the egg is not by hand or hammer forged, and the swan by whom they previously got the eggs sits upright outside the islands."

Riddle 10

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

"Hverjar eru þær rýgjar
á reginfjalli,
elr við kván kona,
þar til er mög of getr,
ok eigu-t þær varðir vera?
Heiðrekr konungr,
hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"What are those ladies
On the mighty mountain,
Woman begets by wife,
So that she bears a son,
And those women have no husbands?**
Heiðrekr king,
Ponder this riddle."

*Female swans.
**This is an idiomatic rendering of (in literal word-order): and having-not [i.e. marriage] those women be.


Currently reading: Reclaiming the Atonement, Patrick Henry Reardon
Current audio book: Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
Currently translating: Hervarar Saga, "The Riddles of Gestumblindi"

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 9

First, here's the answer to riddle 8:

Heiðrekr mælti: "Smækkast nú gáturnar, Gestumblindi, hvat þarf lengr yfir þessu at sitja? Þat er hrafntinna, ok skein á hana sólargeisli."

Your riddles grow small, Gestumblindi, what need is there to sit any longer at this? That is obsidian*, when shone on her a sunbeam.

Riddle 9

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

"Báru brúðir
bleikhaddaðar
ambáttir tvær
öl til skemmu;
var-at þat höndum horfit
né hamri at klappat,
þó var fyrir eyjar utan
örðigr sá, er gerði.
Heiðrekr konungr,
hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"Maidens bore,
Fair-headed,
Serving-maids twain
Ale to the store-house;
Not turned by hands
Nor beaten by hammers,
Though far outside the island
The maker sat upright.**
Heiðrekr king,
Ponder this riddle."

*Literally "raven-flint."
**The thing which was not turned by hands or beaten by hammers must refer to the cask in which the ale was carried, not the ale itself.


Currently reading: For the Life of the World
Current audio book: The Man Who Was Thursday
Currently translating: Hervara saga, "The Riddles of Gestumblindi"

Thesis Theater: The Digital Hervararkviða

As I've mentioned recently, I've been head-down getting the Digital Hervararkviða finished and ready for prime time. Last week it came back from the second reader (Professor Haraldur Bernharðsson) with some great feedback and corrections. Today, I implemented those corrections and sent off the finalized version of the project.

If you're interested in learning more about it--what it is, why I did it, and how I did it--I'll be showcasing it in a Thesis Theater tomorrow night. This online event is open to the public, so we hope to see you there--especially if you're interested in Old Norse, ghost stories, warrior maidens, cursed swords, and scariest of all, the digital encoding of ancient and medieval texts.

Here's the link for the signup: https://signumuniversity.org/event/thesis-theater-richard-rohlin/

Zombies don't scare Hervor. Hervor doesn't scare Hervor.

I'm largely absent from blogging because I am down to the last several weeks of crunch-time on the Digital Hervararkviða (click here for the genesis of this project). The Facsimile layer is as close to finished as anything can be, and I am now working on punctuation for the diplomatic and normalized layers (as punctuation is essentially wholly absent in the original work), as well as a translation and introduction to the poem. The first draft is due to my advisers in a week or two.

I cannot resist commenting, however, on one of the differences between this version of the poem and the one that most people who have read it are likely to be familiar with: Christopher Tolkien's largely excellent 1958 edition of "The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise" (which you can find freely available online). Christopher Tolkien is mainly working from the R-text whereas I am working from the H-text. Without getting too much into the weeds, the two are quite different.

One of those differences comes in at Hervor's approach to her father's barrow. In Christopher Tolkien's edition it reads like this (translation his):

Now Hervor saw where out upon the island burned the fire of the barrows, and she went towards it without fear, though all the mounds were in her path. She made her way into these fires as if they were no more than mist, until she came to the barrow of the berserks.

Here's how that bit reads in the H-text:

hón sá nú hauga eldana ok haugbúa úti standa ok gengr til hauganna ok hræðisk ekki ok óð hón eldana sem reyk þar til er hón kom at haugi berserkjanna þá kvað hón...

And my translation:

She saw now the barrow-fires, and the cairn-dwellers standing outside, and unfrightened she went to the barrow. She waded through the fires there as if they were smoke, until she came to the barrow of the berserks. Then she said...

The word haugbúi (absent in Christopher Tolkien's text) literally means "howe-dwellers." In other words, the dead. And the dead here appear to be out standing around as the barrow-fires* burn above their graves. Hervor simply ignores them, and in fact walks right past them. Not only is she fearless, she "hræðisk ekki." We would translate this as "frightened not," as in "she is not frightened, she is not afraid."

But -isk is the 3rd person present singular reflexive mediopassive ending. Literally "frightens-herself not." Now, we would correctly understand this as meaning she is not frightened, or perhaps that she does not allow herself to be frightened.

But I am amused by the idea that even Hervor doesn't scare Hervor.


*Barrow-fires refer to the ancient belief, still found up to recent times, that on certain nights of the year fires will hover over places, especially graves, where treasure is buried. There are a surprising number of words in Old Norse for this.


Currently reading: The summa of St John of Damascus
Current audio book: The Two Towers, by JRR Tolkien
Currently translating: The Hervararkviða

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 6

Here's the answer to Riddle 5:

"Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar. Þat eru smiðbelgir; þeir hafa engan vind, nema þeim sé blásit, ok eru þeir dauðir sem annat smíði, en fyrir þeim má líkt smíða sverð sem annat."

"Good is your riddle, Gestumblindi, but I have guessed it. That is a smith's bellows; they have no breath, unless they are blown, and otherwise they are as dead as any other smith's tools, but by them you may, if you like, forge a sword* as well as another thing."

Riddle 6

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

"Hvat er þat undra,
er ek úti sá
fyr Dellings durum;
fætr hefir átta,
en fjögur augu
ok berr ofar kné en kvið?
Heiðrekr konungr,
hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"What is that wonder
Which I saw outside
Before Delling's doors?
Of feet it has eight,
And four eyes,
And it bears its knees above its belly?
Heiðrekr king,
Think on this riddle."


*The sword is, of course, the wound-leek referred to in the previous riddle. Wound-leek is a common kenning for a sword.


Currently reading: Homeric Moments
Current audio book: Anubis Gates
Currently translating: Book I of The Aeneid

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 5

To begin with, here's the answer to Riddle 4:

"Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar. Þat er hamarr sá, er hafðr er at gullsmíð; hann kveðr hátt við, er hann kemr á harðan steðja, ok þat er hans gata."

"Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi, but I have guessed it. That is a hammer that, as he is being held by a goldsmith, screams loud when he comes down on the hard anvil, and that is his road."

Riddle 5

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

"Hvat er þat undra,

er ek úti sá

fyr Dellings durum;

ókvikvir tveir

andalausir

sáralauk suðu?

Heiðrekr konungr,

hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"What is that wonder,

That outside I saw

Before Delling's Door*;

Both turning, two

Breathless ones

A wound-leek seethed?

Heiðrekr king,

Think on this riddle."

*This is a difficult kenning. It seems that Dellingr was probably a god, the father of Dagr, the personified day. Dellings durum probably means something like "sunrise." This is the first of a sequence of three riddles which refer to Delling's Door, and there are two more later in the saga. 

Currently Reading: Homeric Moments

Current Audio Book: The Fellowship of the Ring (almost to Rivendell!)

Currently Translating: Vergil's Aeneid

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 4

If you're just joining us, we're going through the Riddles of Gestumblindi, a passage from Herverar saga in which Oðinn, disguised as a troublesome lord named Gestumblindi, has engaged in a riddling match with king Heiðrekr. This riddle contest may be of particular interest to Tolkien fans, since according to John Rateliff's History of the Hobbit, it is almost certainly the Urtext for the famous "Riddles in the Dark" passage in The Hobbit.

To begin today's post, here's the answer to Riddle 3:

"Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar. Þar lagðist þú í forsælu, er dögg var fallin á grasi, ok kældir svá varir þínar ok stöðvaðir svá þorsta þinn."

"Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi, but I have guessed it. You lay in the shade where dew had fallen on the grass, and with it you cooled your lips and stopped your thirst."

Riddle 4

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

"Hverr er sá inn hvelli,

er gengr harðar götur

ok hefir hann þær fyrr of farit,

mjök fast kyssir,

sá er hefir munna tvá

ok á gulli einu gengr?

Heiðrekr konungr,

hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"Who is that shrill one,

who walks hard ways

where he has often fared,

many and firm are his kisses

because he has two mouths,

and on gold alone goes?"

Heiðrekr king,

ponder this riddle."

I'll post the answer, along with the next riddle, later this week. In the meantime, you like Heiðrekr can ponder this riddle!

Currently reading: Homeric Moments

Current audio book: The Fellowship of the Ring

Currently translating: Otfrid's Evangelienbuch

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 3

First, the answer to Riddle #2:

"Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar. Þar fórtu yfir árbrú, ok var árvegr undir þér, en fuglar flugu yfir höfði þér ok hjá þér tveim megin, ok var þat þeira vegr."

"Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi, and I have guessed it. You journeyed across a bridge, and there was an oar-way [river] under it, and a bird flew over your head, and on both sides of you, and that was their way."

The Third Riddle

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

(3) "Hvat er þat drykki,
er ek drakk í gær,*
var-at þat vín né vatn
né in heldr mungát
né matar ekki,
ok gekk ek þorstalauss þaðan?
Heiðrekr konungr,

hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"What was that drink
Which I drank yesterday?
It was not wine nor water
Nor even ale,
Food it was not;
Yet I went thirstless thence?
Heiðrekr king
Ponder this riddle."

*more about this way of referring to "yesterday" here.


Currently reading: Homeric Moments
Current audio book: The Fellowship of the Ring
Currently Translating: Otfrid

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 2

First, the answer to the first riddle:

Konungr segir: "Góð er gáta þín, Gestumblindi, getit er þessar. Færi honum mungát. Þat lemr margra vit, ok margir eru þá margmálgari, er mungát ferr á, en sumum vefst tungan, svá at ekki verðr at orði."

The King said: "Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi, and I have guessed it. Bring ale* to him--'tis ale that lames the wits of many, and many become more talkative when ale gets the upper hand, but for some the tongue gets entangled, so that they cannot speak."

And now for the second riddle:

Þá mælti Gestumblindi:

(2) "Heiman ek fór,

heiman ek för gerða,

sá ek á veg vega;

var þeim vegr undir

ok vegr yfir

ok vegr á alla vega.

Heiðrekr konungr

hyggðu at gátu."

Then said Gestumblindi:

"From home I journeyed,

From home I made a journey,

Looked I on a way of ways;

Was there a way under

And a way over

And ways on all sides.

Heiðrekr king

Ponder this riddle."

As before, I'll post the answer in a few days. Until then, you like Heiðrekr can ponder this riddle.

*The word translated as ale here is mungat, which might also refer to small beer.

Currently reading: Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Illiad

Current audio book: The Fellowship of the Ring

Currently translating: Das Ludwigslied

The Riddles of Gestumblindi: Riddle 1

If you read this blog, you know I am doing some work with Hervarar saga. One of the more memorable moments in the saga is when Oðinn engages King Heiðrekr (the current possessor of the cursed sword Tyrfingr at that moment in the saga) in a riddle contest. Oðinn is disguised as Gestumblindi, a powerful lord who had refused to pay King Heiðrekr tribute. Heiðrekr's practice for resolving disputes was as follows: they must either submit to the judgment of his counsel, or best the king (who was not called "the Wise" for nothing) in a riddle-contest. Oðinn, for his own reasons (as usual) has gone to Heiðrekr disguised as Gestumblindi and engages with him as follows:

'Lord,' said Gestumblindi, 'I have come here because I wish to be reconciled with you.'
'Will you submit to the jugdment of my wise men?' answered the king.
'Are there no other ways of redeeming myself?' asked Gestumblindi.
'There are others,' said the king, 'if you think yourself able to propound riddles.'
'I have no great skill in that,' Gestumblindi replied, 'but the other way seems hard.'
'Then will you rather submit to the judgment of my counselors?' asked the king.
'I choose rather to propound riddles,' said Gestumblindi.
'That is right and fitting,' said the king.
Then said Gestumblindi:
(Trans. C. Tolkien)

For fun and practice, I'm going to be translating the riddles themselves. I'll post a riddle, then the answer to the riddle as well as the next riddle in the following post. Feel free to follow along with me and match wits with Oðinn himself.

Here's the first riddle:

Hafa vildak
þat er ek hafða í gær,
vittu, hvat þat var:
Lýða lemill,
orða tefill
ok orða upphefill.
Heiðrekr konungr,
hyggðu at gátu.

(1) I wish to have today
What I had yesterday,
Ponder what that was:
Men it mames,
Speech destroys,
And speech inspires.
Heiðrekr king,
Ponder this riddle.


Currently reading: Summa Theologiae
Current Audio Book: The Lord of the Rings
Currently translating: The Old High German Tatian

Digitizing Hervor: Part 3 - Creating the Facsimile Layer

In my previous post I introduced TEI encoding and the Menota project. As I mentioned, Menota supports three different levels of text representation: facsimile (as close to the text as possible), diplomatic (abbreviations expanded and some special characters removed) and normalized (word forms match those which would be found in a grammar or dictionary of the language in question). In today's post, I will talk about the process I used for creating the facsimile level of the transcription for the Digital Hervararkviða.

Abbreviations and Special Characters

Abbreviations and what we would call "special characters" (that is, they do not correspond to the characters typically available on an English-language QWERTY keyboard) are extremely common in Old Icelandic manuscripts. Actually, they are extremely common in most medieval manuscripts, but medieval Icelandic scribes seem to have increased the number of abbreviations they were using just at the time that everyone else was moving away from the practice. There may be any number of reasons for this--Iceland's geographic remoteness still lends itself to an extreme linguistic conservatism--but one important factor may have been economic.

Parchment was always expensive in the medieval world, and suitable sheets could not be made from older animals. That meant that in addition to the time-consuming work of turning a mere skin into parchment, that skin came with an opportunity cost of a calf who would never grow into a cow/bull, or a lamb which would never produce wool. In Iceland, perhaps more than in some warmer and less remote places, the cost may have been felt heavily.

Of course Iceland also has its own robust literary tradition throughout the Middle Ages, complete with its own orthography and stylistic tendencies (it has been noted, for instance, that the practice of Skaldic poetry was primarily an Icelandic art form). So it may be as simple as saying that this is the way they liked to do things. The abbreviations found in Icelandic manuscripts can be traced back, via the Anglo-Saxon scribes from whom the Icelanders seem to have chiefly learned their craft, to Roman and even Biblical times. There are three major sources: the Tironian notae, a system of shorthand invented by Cicero's personal secretary; the old Roman system of legal shorthand; and the nomina sacra, a system of abbreviating the names of God which early Christians ultimately borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures, and which had become commonplace in Latin texts by the early Middle Ages.

Matthew James Driscoll identifies four basic types of abbreviations found in old Icelandic texts. I have listed them below, along with examples from the Hauksbok manuscript. But these are only examples which I think typical of these kinds of abbreviations and their use in the text; cataloging every variety of abbreviation in the MS would be too exhaustive for the purpose of this post.

1. Suspension, where only the first letter or letters of a word are written, generally followed, and frequently also preceded, by a point or, occasionally, with a superscript stroke.

e with superscript i for eigi.

h with horizontal bar for hann

h with superscript o for hon

q with points on either side for quað

long s with a point for segir

þ with horizontal bar for þat

minuscule t with superscript i for til

2. Contraction, where the first and/or last letters are written, normally with a superscript stroke, or, less commonly, a point or points.

the name Angantyr, contracted by a superscript stroke over the g

two long s with points on either side for synir

3. Superscript letters, a superscript vowel normally representing that vowel preceded by r or v, a superscript consonant that consonant preceded by a.

hug with a superscript r for hugar

4. Special signs (‘tittles’) or brevigraphs, sometimes originating in a letter or combination of letters.

meg with superscript "er" character for megir. This character is far and away the most common abbreviation used in the Hauksbok manuscript, with the possible exception of the Tironian et.

Learning these abbreviations was by far the most difficult (not to say maddening) part of this process, since none of the training I had in Old Norse up to this time had prepared me to encounter them. Still, I knew they were abbreviations because I had worked with the poem before (in the form of a critical text) and so I knew more or less what it should say. Working backwards in this way, I was able to figure most of them out on my own--but it was a halting process, and my first attempt at a transcription took about three weeks of hard work as I would get halfway through and then suddenly realize I'd been reading a word or a character wrong. I learned a lot, though, and so when I made my final pass (the XML encoding pass) I was able to get it done in about a week. All right, so it was a long week, but the final result is something of which I'm proud--a facsimile which faithfully preserves each and every abbreviation in the original text (or will when the proofreading is finished!).

For the most part, I stuck to the standard encoding for abbreviations as defined by the Menota handbook. When I encountered an abbreviation the handbook didn't cover, I turned to Driscoll's Marking Up Abbreviations in Old Norse Manuscripts. This is a very useful resource which I wish I'd found before I started this project. Where Driscoll also failed me, I used my best judgement, combining the characters at my disposal. Since most of these non-standard cases involved the application of a horizontal bar to a pre-existing letter, this wasn't too hard once I got the hang of it.

In addition to the abbreviations, Menota standards also allow for certain symbols not on the US QWERTY keyboard. Anyone who has spent any amount of time at all with Old English or Old Norse will already be familiar with ð (eth) and þ (thorn). Additionally, Menota recognizes the use of certain rotunda ("rounded") variants of standard letters. For instance, Old Norse often uses an r rotunda instead of the usual r following any letter with a rounded stroke on the right side (such as a b or an o). There are also "small capitals" which are often used to indicate a geminated consonant. The Menota handbook contains instructions for handling each of these characters; however viewing them in a web browser requires the user have a special font installed.

Paleography is, as Prof. Peterson says, something you can really only learn by doing. Tackling this manuscript and creating the most accurate facsimile possible turned into a six-week crash-course in the subject. I hasten to add, lest the reader be daunted, that it was also a whole lot of fun. In his plenary session at Mythmoot IV this year, Michael Drout talked about how much we owe to the philologists of yesteryear, and just how great a gap lies between them and us. Although we are capable of summarizing and sometimes even explaining their work, we're rarely capable of going back and "showing our work" -- explaining how we know the things we know, and how our forerunners came to the conclusions that they did. But until we can, we will not be equipped to question (let alone challenge) those conclusions. The discipline of philology becomes static, and a vicious cycle results.

That is one of the primary reasons I undertook this project. The first job of the philologist is, as Fulk says, the editing and preparation of texts for readers. I wanted to do the work--not just talk about the work that others before me have done. But in the process I have discovered a marvelous thing--the joy of reading Old Norse as it was written down on the page over 600 years ago; the joy of deliberating over each stroke of the pen as much as over each half-line or case-ending. As Svanhildur Oskarsdottir writes, philology "means love of words. So let’s do it – let’s fall in love."

Attached below you'll find a PDF of the Facsimile layer of this project. There are no frills, nor has the proofreading process been completed yet, so take it for what it is. But perhaps it'll give you a better sense of what it might have been like to pick up this poem and read it in the 1300's.

The next layer of this project, the Diplomatic layer, is still in progress. In the meantime, my next post will be a (hopefully shorter) dig into the meter of Eddic poetry, and of the Hervararkviða in particular.

The Digital Hervararkviða - Facsimile Layer

Digitizing Hervor - Part 2: Approaches & Methods

In the last post, I introduced the Digital Hervararkviða, the labor of love I have undertaken in my quest to come to a better understanding of the ancient Germanic world, it's languages and literature. In this post, I'll talk a bit more about the methods I'm using to create the digital edition of the poem, and why what I'm doing isn't just redundant with previous critical texts of the poem and of Hervarar's saga.

TEI Encoding

First, I'll need to explain a little about TEI encoding. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is "a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form." Essentially, TEI encoding is a set of standards for taking a text--say the poems of Emily Dickinson or a sixteenth-century Polish fencing manual--and turning them into a robust, searchable XML document which can then be displayed in a number of different formats, inserted into a database in order to perform corpus linguistics analysis, and etc. Basically, once the text is in this standardized XML form, you can do anything with it.

[If you're reading this on a web browser there's a pretty good chance you have an idea of what XML is, but if you don't, you can go and educate yourself here.]

The Menota Project

Now, there are a lot of TEI encoding projects out there (including some which are pretty useful for medievalists and classicists everywhere, like the Perseus project), but the one that is important to this project is the Medieval Nordic Text Archive (Menota). Menota is basically a network of institutions working to do for the Scandinavian languages (mostly Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian at this point, though there are some Old Swedish texts as well) what the Perseus project has done for Greek and Latin. Menota has laid out a process as well as a series of standards for encoding these Old Norse manuscripts at three different levels of text representation:

Facsimile: At this level, the manuscript is transcribed character by character, line by line, retaining all abbreviations and allographic variations found in the original text. This is the closest level of reading possible short of actually handling the manuscript.

Diplomatic: Certain allographic variants are normalized (for instance, the rotunda "long s" is frequently changed to the modern "short" s. Abbreviations are also expanded, and the expansions usually italicized.

Normalized: Spelling and word forms are standardized to conform to grammars and dictionaries for the language in question. For our purposes, this means altering the words to match what you'd find in a dictionary like Zoega's, or a grammar like A New Introduction to Old Norse. This level is useful for newer students of the language who might be confused by the inconsistencies in orthography and even morphology which might be found in an unedited manuscript. It is also the level at which most critical editions tend to be produced. Old English texts, for instance, tend to be normalized to a particular West Saxon literary style, which can often lead to the misleading impression that writing in Anglo-Saxon England conformed to a fairly homogeneous standard.

How normalized spelling is determined for a dead language is a subject for another post, but for now it's enough to know that this...

The beginning of Hervararkviða from G. Turville-Petre's critical edition of Hervara saga.

...is not the same as this:

The same passage from 74r of the Hauksbok manuscript

The Birth of the Digital Hervararkviða 

In a way, that gap between the manuscript and normalized editions is what birthed this entire project. I knew I wanted to do something with the Hervararkviða or with Eddic poetry in general; I knew that pretty much all of the Eddic poetry out there already had at least one good critical edition along with multiple translations (maybe not as many translations as Beowulf, but the Poetic Edda has been done lots of times). It was while chatting with one of my professors at Signum, Prof. Paul Peterson, that I stumbled upon the idea for this project. Paul suggested a TEI text and, knowing I was interested in the Hervararkviða, pointed out that high resolution photographs of the entire Hauksbok manuscript were available online. 

Curious, I began trying to read the manuscript, very quickly realizing I only thought I knew how to read Old Norse. This manuscript was full of strange letters I did not recognize, spelling variations I had never seen, and more abbreviations I had ever seen in a single text (and I work with the US Government, where abbreviations are our stock and trade). I had always known that the normalized text was not quite the text I was encountering in a textbook or reader, but until I actually studied the manuscript for myself I had no appreciation for just how wide that gap could be. 

Bridging that gap, then, for other students of Old Norse, is one of the primary goals of the project. And the Menota Project's encoding standards allow us to do that by encoding each word with readings on all three representation levels.

XML in Action

Let's take the word berserkjanna, the genitive plural of berserkr. This word appears in the prose introduction to the Hervararkviða. In the manuscript, it's actually written as: 

Which in my facsimile I have transcribed as:

I have to render the transcription as an image for this blog post, because otherwise there are characters which won't show up unless you have certain medieval fonts installed. You'll notice that there's a little squiggly line over the b. This is an abbreviation for er. The funky-looking "f" is really a long s. You'll note there's an i here instead of a j, and a bar over the n to indicate a second n has been omitted. I'll talk in greater detail about Old Norse abbreviations in a future post, but it's important to understand that it was fairly standard to use this many abbreviations in a word.

On a diplomatic level, we would render this word: berserkianna. The s has been standardized, and the abbreviations have been expanded and italicized. 

In our normalized edition this word would be rendered (as Turville-Petre in fact does): berserkjanna. Note the i has been changed to a j here, because that's in keeping with the way you'd find the form listed in a grammar or dictionary.

A properly formed Menota XML document allows us to encode all three levels in a single word, like so, with the <me:facs> tag corresponding to the facsimile-level reading, and so on:

<w>
   <choice>
    <me:facs>b<am>&er;</am>&slong;erkian<am>&bar;</am>a</me:facs>
    <me:dipl>b<ex>er</ex>serkian<ex>n</ex>a</me:dipl>
  <me:norm>berserkjanna</me:norm>
   </choice>
</w>

Of course to do this, it means you're encoding every single word three times. Which is what I've done. For the entire poem. Yep, it took me a while. And I'm still not done.

Once it's all in there, though, you can use an XSLT stylesheet (a topic for another post) to render any single reading level. That means that every Menota XML document has the potential to contain readings on all three levels, not to mention a wide variety of information about each word--lexical citation forms, base forms, morphology, syntax, the type of word (noun, proper name, verb, etc.). Although this kind of secondary information wouldn't typically be displayed by your style sheet, it might be accessible via a specialized web page or app. So in the final edition of the Digital Hervararkviða, the student should be able to mouse over a word and see its case/number (for nouns) or tense/mood/number (for verbs), as well as the lexical citation form that they can look up in the dictionary. The student should also be able to toggle between the facs/dip/normalized views at will and compare them to photographs of the text. And of course, since all of this information is being stored in XML, it has the potential to be used in a database for performing corpus-level analytics.

In the next post, I'll talk about the process used for creating the manuscript facsimile. We'll jump into the deep end of the pool of Old Norse paleography, and I'll recount the roadblocks and frustrations I encountered as I attempted to figure out just how people decided how things should be put down on paper more than 600 years ago.

Digitizing Hervor - Part 1: The Project

"Wake thou, Angantyr!

Wakes you Hervor,

Svafa's offspring,

Your only daughter;

The keen-edged blade

From the barrow give me,

The sword dwarves smithied

For Sigrlami."

This is the first of a series of posts I hope to do about a project I've spent the last 7 weeks working on, and which I expect will occupy my attention to some extent all the way through the summer of 2018.

The Project

I am creating a digital edition of the Hervararkviða, also known as Hervor's Incantation or The Waking of Angantyr. This edition will be based on the version found in the Hauksbók manuscript and will include a Manuscript Facsimile, Diplomatic, Normalized Old Norse, and Modern English translation, along with textual apparatus and a short commentary. The Digital Hervararkviða is intended to be a student's edition specifically for students of Old Norse and Germanic Philology.

The Hervararwhat?

The Hervararkviða is an Old Norse poem, written in an Eddic verse form called fornyrðislag, literally "ancient-sayings-law." It tells the story of the shield-maiden Hervor's quest to wake the ghost of her famous berserker father Angantyr (and his eleven brothers) and bully him into handing over her family's cursed sword, Tyrfingr, a weapon so bloodthirsty that once drawn it cannot be sheathed again without shedding blood, even if it is the blood of a kinsman. Hervor succeeds in acquiring the sword, even though she knows it will prove the destruction of her descendants. Hervor's story is part of a larger saga known as Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks or The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, written down in the late 13th or early 14th century, but clearly compiled from a number of much older stories.

So why are you doing this?

In the Fall of 2014 I began working on my MA from Signum University. Over time, my interest in general medieval literature has developed into a particular interest in the discipline of Germanic Philology and the languages and stories of the ancient northern world (although I remain interested in a wide variety of Indo-European studies). A project like the Digital Hervararkviða ticks a lot of boxes for my final thesis project: it's a good way to showcase my strengths as both a technology professional and a philologist. It's also a useful proof-case for the application of the digital humanities to what has traditionally been regarded as a pretty "dusty" field. In that way, it's a neat microcosm of Signum's mission statement.

Right, right. But why are you really doing this?

Someone (I do not remember whom) once said, "I read because I want to speak with the dead." That's an apt way to sum up my relationship with old texts, and particularly poetry like the Hervararkviða or Beowulf. The almost-alien quality of the medieval script, the arresting strangeness of the alliterative verse, the sonorous music of the language--all of these things take me back (as surely they must have done for 13th century Icelanders) to a different world of larger-than-life characters.

And it's hard to imagine anyone more larger-than-life than Hervor (who, as it happens, also wants to speak with the dead). Stunningly beautiful, as a young woman she cares more for swordplay and horsemanship than for weaving or embroidery, and takes out her teenage angst by essentially heading for the woods and living the life of a bandit. After she is goaded about her parentage by a slave, she decides to prove she is actually the daughter of the famous berserker Angantyr by going and claiming the family's cursed sword from her father's ghost. This she eventually manages to do, as the poem retells, after Angantyr's repeated attempts to terrify her fail. But it turns out Angantyr has a good reason for denying his daughter the sword: It is cursed, and if she takes it it will be the ruin of all her family. Hervor acknowledges this, but says she doesn't care. As so often is the case in these stories, the prophecy comes true. By her pride, Hervor secures her reputation, but dooms her future heirs.

Hervor (like Eowyn or Turin Turambar) is the sort of proud, doomed character with whom I fall in love rather easily, and the Hervararkviða--which I first encountered during Signum's Introduction to Old Norse--is one of my favorite Old Norse poems.

But do we really need another edition?

That's a good question. After all, a very good critical edition of the whole of Hervarar saga (a synthesis of the three main manuscript sources) is freely available from The Viking Society for Northern Research, as is a facing translation and commentary by Christopher Tolkien. I'll answer this question in my next post, when I introduce the methodology I am using in this project, and what will make The Digital Hervararkviða so different from previous editions of the poem.