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Research Group for Medieval Philology

Medieval texts

Old Norse texts are available in several digital archives. The research group actively works with the XML-encoding of Old Norse primary sources, both in terms of transcriptions as well as annotation.

Main content

Menota is a digital archive of Old Norse texts. Most of them are available on several levels of transcription: in a strict so-called facsimile transcription, a less strict diplomatic transcription and in a normalised version. Some of the text also contain information about the lemmas and grammatical information of every single word. 

The texts are found in an archive arranged by manuscript shelfmark. In addition to the ordinary archive, a test archive has been opened and an archive for diplomas. The texts in the ordinary archive can be downloaded for free use (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

The Menota Handbook provides practical guidelines for the XML-encoding of texts compatible with the guides of the Text Encoding Initiative. The handbook gives answers to, amongst others, questions about the encoding of special characters, content structure, morphological and metrical parameters and many more. Furthermore, the handbook offers schemas for use during pre process of encoding (e.g. DTD and Relax NG). Version 3.0 of the handbook was published 12 December 2019 with contributions from several members of the research group.