Machina Memorialis

Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages: An international project to edit the corpus of medieval skaldic poetry.

Introduction: General objective of the project

The general objective of the project Norse-Icelandic Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages is to produce a new edition of the known corpus of Norse-Icelandic skaldic poetry. The edition will appear in book and electronic form. The editors 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. This will be a critical edition with an English translation, which will, however, in all cases reexamine the manuscript evidence for the poetic texts and their locations. To do this a data bank of photographs of the manuscripts will need to be established for the editors to work from. Many relevant photographs already exist in the two Arnamagnæan Institutes, in Reykjavík and Copenhagen. At the same time, there will be some photographs that will have to be made specially for the project. As the editors plan to issue the edition in electronic format as well as book form, we will also be seeking permission to scan the relevant images from photographs for use in the electronic version of the edition. (At this stage we envisage scans of the lines containing the skaldic verses alone and not of whole folios of the manuscripts in which the poems or verses occur.)

The published edition will be divided into three parts. The first will include complete, identifiable poems or fragments thereof; the second will include lausavísur (single verses) and Finnur Jónsson’s ubestemmelige vers (poetry of indeterminate provenance), while the third part will be a bibliography. Depending on the outcome of our negotiations with publishers, the parts may or may not comprise separate volumes.