The following is a list of links to a variety of digital resources that may be useful for scholars and students of medieval Norse-Icelandic culture, history, and literature.
Dictionaries and glossaries
Note: Scanned copies of several of those dictionaries listed below can also be found through Google books and/or Archive.org
Ordbog over Det gamle norske sprog (also here): Johan Fritzner’s Ordbog over Det gamle norske sprog [Dictionary of the Old Norse language] (1886-96).
Wörterbuch zur altnordischen Prosaliteratur: Walter Baetke’s Wörterbuch zur altnordischen Prosaliteratur [Dictionary of Old Norse prose literature] (1965-68).
An Icelandic-English Dictionary (also here or here): Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon’s An Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874).
A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (also here, here, or here): Geir T. Zoëga’s A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (1910).
Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog: The University of Copenhagen’s Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog [Dictionary of Old Norse Prose] (2010).
Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis: Ordbog over det Norsk-Islandske skjaldesprog: Finnur Jónsson’s second, heavily revised edition of Sveinbjörn Egilsson’s Lexicon poeticum antiquæ linguæ septentrionalis [Dictionary of Old Norse-Icelandic Poetry] (1861; 2nd ed. 1931).
Gammeldansk Ordbog: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab’s [The Danish Language and Literature Society] Gammeldansk Ordbog [Dictionary of Old Danish].
Ordbog til det ældre danske sprog (1300–1700) (also here): Otto Kalkar’s Ordbog til det ældre danske sprog (1300-1700) [Dictionary of the Old Danish language (1300-1700)] (1881-1907).
Fornsvensk lexikalisk databas: The University of Gothenburg’s Fornsvensk lexikalisk databas [Lexical database of Old Swedish] drawing from Knut Fredrik Söderwall’s Ordbok Öfver svenska medeltids-språket [Dictionary of medieval Swedish] (1884-1918, supplement 1953-73) and Carl Johan Schlyter’s Ordbok till Samlingen af Sweriges Gamla Lagar [Glossary for the corpus of Old Swedish laws] (1877).
A Lexicon of Medieval Nordic Law (also here): A polyglot dictionary covering legal terminology used in medieval Nordic law texts. It was created as a project within the The Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism at Stockholm University.
Málið.is: A web portal designed to facilitate digital searching for information on the Icelandic language and learning about language usage through simple, one-stop online access to seven databases that differ considerably in their nature and content, as they are intended to serve different purposes. Though primarily focused on modern Icelandic, the portal serves many uses for scholars of Old Norse-Icelandic language.
Manuscript catalogues and collections
Handrit.is: A digital catalogue of Icelandic and Norse manuscripts preserved in the National and University Library of Iceland, the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, and Arnamagnæan Collection, including digitized images of many manuscripts.
NorS Digital Collection: A digital archive of photograph images of the manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan Collection as well as photographs of the manuscripts in Rask’s Collection, Krieger’s Collection, and the Accessoria Collection, as well as various images of manuscripts before, during and after conservation.
The Arnamagnæan Institute Digitized Manuscripts: A selection of digitized manuscripts from the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen.
E-manuscripts: Digital facsimile versions of selected manuscripts in the Royal Danish Library’s collections, including a variety of medieval manuscripts.
A Digital Catalogue of Manuscripts in Sweden: A digital catalogue of medieval and early modern manuscripts held in Swedish libraries.
Virtual manuscripts: A selection of digital reproductions of some of the ca. 6500 fragments from medieval manuscripts in Norwegian public collections, which springs from the research project “From manuscript fragments to book history” (2012-17).
Katalog over den Arnamagnæanske haandskriftsamling: A scanned copy of Kristian Kaalund’s two-volume catalogue of the manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan collection.
Stories for all time: An electronic catalogue of all the manuscripts in which fornaldarsaga texts are found, containing information on their format and layout, the other texts they preserve and when, where and by and/or for whom they were written. The total number of manuscripts in the catalogue is 1049; a quarter of these were not previously known to scholarship. Ancillary to this is a fully searchable bibliography of editions, translations and secondary material pertaining to the fornaldarsögur.
Text collections
Note: In recent years more and more academic journals and publishers are adopting open access policies. Click here for a list of some open access journals and publishers with an interest in Old Norse-Icelandic literature.
Íslenskt textasafn: A searchable database of Icelandic texts including Íslendingasögur, Heimskringla, Sturlunga saga, Fornaldarsögur, Heilagar Meyjar, Kvæði, and Þættir.
Medieval Nordic Text Archive: A collection of medieval texts in digital form containing texts in the Nordic languages as well as in Latin, some of which are fully lemmatized.
Netútgáfan (snerpa.is): A collection of modernized Old Icelandic texts in digital form, including Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, Gylfaginning, Heimskringla, Íslendingasögur, Íslendingaþættir, Landnámabók (Sturlubók), and Jómsvíkinga saga.
Icelandic saga database: Contains all the extant Íslendingasögur, made available in a variety of open formats using modernized Icelandic spelling, with the Old Norse versions and translations into English and other languages made available where these exist in the public domain.
Heimskringla.no: An online collection of Old Norse source material, primarily Eddas, Íslendingasögur, Skaldic poetry, and some background material consisting of some 6000 titles in the Old Norse language or translated into the modern Scandinavian languages.
Septentrionalia pdf library: A collection of digitized versions of public-domain scholarship and text editions.
Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages: An international project to edit the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic Skaldic poetry, producing physical and digital editions and an online database.
The Poetic Edda, A Dual-Language Edition: The first open-access, single-volume parallel Old Norse edition and English translation of the Poetic Edda by Edward Pettit. It contains thirty-six Eddic poems each of which is provided with an introduction, synopsis and suggestions for further reading. The Old Norse texts are furnished with a textual apparatus recording the manuscript readings behind this edition’s emendations, as well as select variant readings.
Diplomatarium Norvegicum: An online searchable version of the printed edition of the Diplomatarium Norvegicum, which consists of 22 volumes of printed transcripts of medieval diplomas concerning Norway in the middle ages.
Diplomatarium Fennicum: A webservice of Finnish medieval documentary sources, developed and hosted by the National Archives of Finland. It contains material from the 9th century to 1530 and, at the moment, the text corpus encompasses approximately 6850 documents.
Viking society web publications: Digitized copies of virtually all of the Viking Society for Northern Research’s publications, including critical studies, text editions, and translations, with a three-year delay for recent titles.
The International Saga Conference Archive: Collects materials from previous saga conferences and makes them available on the web for use by scholars and other interested parties; over 1300 papers and/or abstracts by some 600 scholars.
Bækur.is: Collects digital reproductions of Icelandic books, including some of the earliest printed books in Icelandic (see here) and some of the earliest printed editions of Old Norse-Icelandic texts (see, e.g., here or here), among many other useful print sources.
Timarit.is: A digital library granting access to a variety of newspapers and periodicals from the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Iceland, including several journals of interest for scholars of Old Norse Icelandic literature, such as Skínir, Gripla, and Saga, among others.
Other digital projects
Icelandic Saga Map: A geographically mapped database of the Íslendingasögur.
A Concordance to the Proverbs and Proverbial Materials of the Old Icelandic Sagas: A project collecting information on the occurrence and uses of proverb texts in Old Icelandic literature. It is structured by genres, then presenting the paroemial, or proverbial, inventory of individual works. While primary focus is placed upon the Íslendingasögur, or Family Sagas, as they are frequently known in English, the intention is to include eventually all of the genres of the medieval Icelandic period.
Sagnagrunnur: A geographically mapped database of the main published collections of Icelandic folk legends.
Runor: The search service Runor, supported by the Swedish National Heritage Board is a digital research platform that will make available approximately 7,000 inscriptions with reports and images from various databases, institutions and collections. Click here to go directly to the interactive map.
RuneS: This project contains comprehensive basic data on the nature, content, and context of the European runic finds, covering data on runic inscriptions on everyday objects of different types and on runic entries in Mediaeval manuscripts, the Runica Manuscripta. Click here to go directly to the interactive map.
Islandia Latina: A database project gathering information on Latin authors, texts, and manuscripts known and used in medieval Iceland.
Medieval Nordic Literature in Latin: An in-depth introduction to all known literary works written in Latin in the Nordic countries before the Reformation (ca 1530), documenting the breadth and importance of writings in Latin which have too often been treated as footnotes to the vernacular literatures.
Norse World: An interactive spatial-temporal resource for research on spatiality and worldviews in medieval literature from Sweden and Denmark.
The World-Tree Project: An interactive digital archive for the teaching and studying of Norse and Viking cultures.
Mimisbrunnr: An internet-based project focused on the field of Ancient Germanic Studies, the academic study of the ancient Germanic language-speaking peoples.
Eitri: A tool built to sort, filter, and analyze 326 Norse archaeological finds, and includes a Browser, Map, Gallery, Timeline, Property Histogram, and Keyword Search.
WikiSaga: This website features the text of Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar and the text of Njáls saga with a searchable annotated bibliography of scholarly articles about Egils saga and about Njáls saga, with a unique entry devoted to each article, and in some instances, the entry is linked to the relevant chapter of the sagas.
Pre-Christian Religions of the North: An interface to some web resources associated with the project ‘Pre-Christian Religions of the North,’ designed to be a reference point for the sources for PCRN with contributions from members of the project.
Ísmús: A digital database of Icelandic music, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, that includes sound recordings, photographs, films, manuscripts, and texts.
Nafnið.is: An online searchable database of material from Árnastofnun’s place name collection. It contains nearly 14,000 documents with more than half a million Icelandic place names.
The Gersum Project: A project that aims to understand the Scandinavian influence on English vocabulary by examining the origins of more than 900 words in a corpus of Middle English poems from the North of England.
The Fragile Heritage Project: A project that aims to create a digital collection of Icelandic language manuscripts held in public and private holdings across Canada and the U.S.A.
Christopher W. E. Crocker 