Background

Menota is a network of leading Nordic archives, libraries and research departments working with medieval texts and manuscript facsimiles. The aim of Menota is to preserve and publish medieval texts in digital form and to adapt and develop encoding standards necessary for this work. The archive will contain texts in the Nordic languages as well as in Latin. There are now 17 members of Menota (see bottom of the page) and new members are welcome to join the network.

News (in Norwegian)

Mange nye middelaldertegn i Unicode v. 5.1 (22.05.2008).

Menotas kodingshåndbok publisert i v. 2.0 (16.05.2008).

Ny funksjonalitet i Menota (18.04.2008).

Menotas håndbok snart klar i versjon 2.0 (28.02.2008).

Danske folkeviser på nettet (10.09.2007).

Menotas tekstarkiv er åpnet (29.06.2007).

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Text archive

Menota can now offer a dozen Medieval Nordic texts (approx. 700,000 words), several of which are fully lemmatised. A catalogue with full search facilities was opened on 29 June 2007:

Menota catalogue of medieval texts

The texts will be encoded on one or more levels. The most widely used level will be the diplomatic level (as seen in many Arnamagnæan editions), while some texts will also be encoded on a facsimile level (i.e. in a very close transcription) and some on a normalised level (as in the Íslenzk fornrit series). This is a list of published texts as well as texts which we expect to see published (in the not too distant future):

Published & forthcoming texts

Encoding guidelines

An editorial board appointed by the Menota council is working on a handbook for the encoding of texts in the archive. The Menota handbook was published on 20 May 2003 in version 1.0 and on 5 May 2004 in version 1.1. These versions are compatible with TEI P4.

Version 2.0 of the handbook was published on 16 May 2008 and is compatible with TEI P5 (release 1 November 2007). This is a major revision and we recommend that users migrate to this version. However, all versions will be kept accessible on this site:

The Menota handbook (all versions)

Lexicographical resources

Several dictionaries of Medieval Nordic languages are accessible on the web. They are presently in different formats and the interfaces are not uniform, but they do represent an extremely useful resource:

Fritzner’s dictionary (Icelandic and Norwegian)

Söderwall’s dictionary (Swedish)

Kalkar’s dictionary (Danish)

A project headed by Hans Fix, University of Greifswald, has made Walter Baetke’s Wörterbuch zur altnordischen Prosaliteratur accessible in an updated version for free usage. The dictionary can be downloaded as a PDF file (75 MB). A fast connection is thus essential.

Walter Baetke’s dictionary digital (link to registration page)

Ongoing dictionary projects:

Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog (Icelandic and Norwegian)

Gammeldansk ordbog (Danish)

A network for Medieval Nordic dictionaries has been established within Menota:

Nordiske middelalderordbøker (NMO)

Digital archives and libraries

A number of archives, libraries and museums have started making their holdings of Medieval Nordic texts or manuscripts available via the web:

Text resources

Projects

Some projects associated with Menota:

Menota TVB - a project funded by the Norwegian Research Council 2003–2006

Vadstena-prosjektet - a project funded by the Swedish National Bank

Medieval Unicode Font Initiative - fonts for medieval writings

The electronic Edda - a cooperative project for the encoding of the Eddic poems