LEXICON POETICUM · A lexical resource for Old-Norse Icelandic skaldic poetry and its relevant social fields
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-08-01 → 2018-07-31
- EU contribution
- €212,195
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Lexicon Poeticum: A lexical resource for Old-Norse Icelandic skaldic poetry and its relevant social fields
This fellowship begins a long-term project to produce a new dictionary of Old Norse poetry. The corpus was composed between the 9th and 14th centuries by poets from Norway and its settlements throughout Europe, especially Iceland. The dictionary will replace earlier works not updated since the 1930s and is closely related to the Skaldic Project (skaldic.abdn.ac.uk), which has been producing new editions and translations of the corpus. Lexicon Poeticum gives us an understanding of not only the language but also the thought world of Viking and medieval Scandinavia. The project develops interfaces and data models for treating complex texts, allowing links between the material evidence for the poetry (manuscripts and runic inscriptions) and its words, the poetry itself, and the dictionary. The web application developed by the project (lexiconpoeticum.org) aims to provide an accessible entry point into the words and concepts used by Viking and medieval Scandinavian poets. It is at the same time the interface used to produce the dictionary, updated in real time, and so brings the work of the scholar closer to the broader community. The project aims to develop and analyse a resource for understanding the lexicon of Old Norse poetry. It does this by integrating as closely as possible with existing dictionaries (esp. the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP: onp.hum.ku.dk) and corpora (the Skaldic Project and the Codex Regius project), including overcoming major differences in modelling of each project. It develops a semantic model for a large part of the lexicon based on native ontologies found in related texts.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The proposed project will establish me as the leader of the next generation of researchers in key fields of Old Norse studies. I will gain a major new disciplinary base in my broader field and experience in leading a major project which will help to train and engage a new generation of scholars. The project analyses the language of Old Norse skaldic poetry, one of the main sources for the history, culture and religion of early Scandinavia. It is a highly valuable corpus for many fields: much of it dates from the Viking Age and was the principle source for medieval historians for that period. Its language and form is extremely complex, which has made it inaccessible to non-specialist scholars and the general public. Since the poetry was first rediscovered it has been recognised that it contains a large vocabulary distinct from that of prose: some 10,000 different Old Norse words occur only in poetry. The project Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages has made this difficult material accessible to a broad audience. The present project builds on that work, documenting and mapping the words of this poetry. The main output will be an electronic dictionary linked to the text corpus and translation. I will address a long-standing and well-recognised gap in the lexicography of Old Norse, superseding the problematic Lexicon Poeticum of 1931. My approach is built on the state-of-the art textual philology and digitisation methodologies of the Skaldic Project. At the Department of Nordic Research I will develop lexicographic methodologies to produce the new dictionary, which will for the first time link the words of the corpus to their material evidence, realised in digital technologies. The resulting resource will provide the foundation for further linguistic and literary analysis of skaldic poetry. It will thus help to answer questions about the religion, culture, society and history of Scandinavia and its deep and long-standing connections with the rest of Europe.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET · KOBENHAVNCoordinatorDenmark
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union