Project Idea
The idea for this project developed from a reading course for which the participants had prepared themselves with the help of grammars and dictionaries in order to be able to translate the individual sentences into German correctly, both factually and linguistically. It is not easy, especially for beginners, to keep track of the formal variety of Old Norse words, which can differ greatly in form from the dictionary entry due to various sound changes.
Originally, the preparations of the individual participants were to be used to completely open up the rather short text of the Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða grammatically, in order to give a reader enough help that he or she can master and understand the text on his or her own. The aim was to create a digital reading edition of the saga. The starting text was the edition by Guðni Jónsson (1945), which is available as a digital text on heimskringla.no.
It quickly became apparent that an exact grammatical determination was much more time-consuming than preparing for a meeting. The preliminary result was sobering: complete determination of the first two chapters by seminar participants and a large number of partial determinations saved in an XML file. On the plus side, there was a ready-made workflow for generating a website based on the XML-encoded grammatical information.
