A Female Legendary from Iceland: “Kirkjubæjarbók” (AM 429 12mo) in The Arnamagnæan Collection, Copenhagen ed. by Kirsten Wolf (review)

A Female Legendary from Iceland: “Kirkjubæjarbók” (AM 429 12mo) is the third volume in the series “Manuscripta Nordica,” which announces itself as “Early Nordic Manuscripts in Digital Facsimile.” Each volume consists of a printed introduction and a CD-Rom. This latter contains a copy of the printed introduction, full color photographs of the main manuscript being studied, related manuscript facsimiles, and other materials. The first volume was Tales of Knights: Perg. fol. nr 7 in The Royal Library, Stockholm (Am 567 VIβ 4to, NKS 1265 IIc fol.), ed. Christopher Sanders (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 2000). It is very much in the spirit of a traditional manuscript facsimile. The printed introduction covers manuscript contents, codicological analysis, binding, orthography and paleography, provenance and date. Since all the sagas contained in the manuscript have been published, although not all editions use Holm Perg. fol. nr 7 as their base text, there is no transcription of any of the manuscript material. The CD-Rom has color images of the manuscripts mentioned in the title—with ultra-violet images being available where appropriate—and some other supplemental material.

Christopher Sanders also provides an introduction to the series, which states (prophetically): “The forthcoming volumes will not necessarily be uniform in concept; it will be natural in certain instances to include digital transcriptions of the texts of the manuscripts, just as developments in digital technology may result in modifications of the electronic format” (p. 10). The next volume, which appeared nine years later, was indeed radically different in concept and execution: Alexanders saga: AM 519a 4º in The Arnamagnæan Collection, Copenhagen, ed. Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009).

Andrea (Van Arkel-)de Leeuw van Weenen has been one of the true pioneers in establishing a viable methodology for the use of computer technology in Old Norse textual editing. She has spent unimaginable hours developing methodologies and exploring the limitations of the technology only to have such work rendered obsolete by the exponential increase of processor power and the introduction of new media platforms. For more than ten years she worked on her ill-starred Möðruvallabók project. I say ill-starred because by the time the results were published, they were already obsolete having been overtaken by technical innovations. Around the time the project began, full-color manuscript facsimiles were being published, although at considerable cost, but by the beginning of the 1990s, digital technology and the CD-Rom were promising high quality facsimiles at more reasonable cost (as, for example, Kevin Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf, first appearing in 1999). The problem of technology becoming obsolete is already a concern. I recently obtained a copy of a 1990 edition of Das Promptuarium Medicinae, an early herbal first published in 1483. In addition to the published text, the edition has an electronic version in the back pocket—on a 5¼” floppy diskette! My university is a Research I institution with an emphasis on science, technology, and engineering, but nowhere on campus was I able to find a facility that still had the capability to read such a piece of hardware. Luckily it turned out that the contents had been posted to the Internet, but it still leaves the diskette in the back of the book, unread and unusable.

The plan of the Möðruvallabók project was to produce a graph-simile of the manuscript: not an edition of the text, because the 11 leaves of the manuscript that date from the seventeenth century were omitted from the study, but a machine-produced (mainframe) rendition of each grapheme of the fourteenth-century leaves, shape by shape, line by line, column by column, and leaf by leaf. The project also envisioned a grammar of the manuscript and a lemmatized index. The first...