by Dr. Zoe Borovsky
This on-line database, a digitized version of Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson´s three-volume popular edition of Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda (1943-44), is intended as a "digital appendix" for my research on these mythical-heroic "sagas of antiquity." These sagas with their fantastic accounts of Scandinavian heroes, whose adventures took place in the mythic past prior to the settlement of Iceland (ca. 870 A.D.), are presumed to have circulated orally before they were recorded much later. Saxo Grammaticus incorporated some of these texts in his thirteenth century history of Denmark (Gesta Danorum) and Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson may also have used some of these narratives as sources for his history of Norwegian kings (Heimskringla). The manuscripts on which modern editions are based were produced in Iceland during the 14th and 15th centuries. Although a few of these sagas have appeared in scholarly editions (see Stephen A. Mitchell 1991 Heroic Sagas and Ballads for bibliography of English translations, editions, and secondary literature), most have not. With the increasing attention given to popular culture and the mythical/supernatural dimension of all sagas, scholars are re-evaluating the relationship of these texts (as well as the other "romantic" sagas such as the riddarasögur or "sagas of knights") to the more historical sagas of kings, bishops, and Icelandic families.This searchable database is intended as an aid to that reevaluation and, hopefully, a demonstration of the usefulness of such a resource. Ideally suited to the electronic medium, these formulaic, episodic sagas can be accessed and searched more readily than printed versions of the texts. It is more flexible than a concordance, since you can, for example, construct different types of queries and view those results in different formats--which can then be printed out.
My own research on mythical beings in the sagas led me to the text-analysis software TACT. Developed at the University of Toronto, this program allows for more complex searches than simple word searches. Rather than relying solely on modern dictionaries for categorizing supernatural creatures in medieval texts, one can search the texts themselves for word-pattern associations. Not only can TACT locate every occurrence of the word jötunn ("giant"), but it can check for other words that tend to occur near it in a text. These "collocates" can then be compared with the ones for other words that are often translated as "giant," such as þurs or risi to ascertain whether medieval audiences would classify these terms the same way we have done today. The results of my research using TACT and this fornaldar corpus were presented at the Digital Resources for the Humanities Conference at Oxford in September 1997 and at a TACT workshop I gave at UC-Berkeley (sponsored by Townsend Working Group for Computers and the Humanities Berkeley Language Center) in April 1998.
Because installing and running TACT can challenge even the most technically proficient humanities' scholars, TACTweb, although it does not have all the features of TACT, provides a convenient alternative. It can be administered by a humanities-computing specialist on a server, providing access to this sophisticated technical tool without installing and running the program on the individual´s computer. Since TACT has not yet been made available for use on Mac computers, TACTweb, accessible to anyone with a web-browser, expands its potential users beyond the PC-proficient.
My sense is that digital texts will never actually supplant the reading of printed texts, but they will certainly change the way we read them and what we "do" with them. While modern scholars have imposed their notion of genre on the editions we use, a digital corpus can be "customized" in a way that more closely resembles the context in which they were recorded–the manuscripts themselves. I envision expanding this database to include other fornsögur ("sagas of antiquity") so that one could assemble and search specific manuscripts (e.g., AM 152 fol.) for patterns, anomalies, and associations in the versions of the sagas it contains.
August, 1998