Interactive online edition of Völuspá

[Manny]

May I humbly draw the attention of the august membership to the interactive online edition of the Völuspá we've been developing under the LARA project? Details here. We'd love to know what you guys think.

[Manny]

We're organising a group reading of the Völuspá using the interactive online edition we've developed together with the Arni Magnusson Institute, Iceland - you can see it here. Open it in Chrome or Firefox, and by clicking or hovering with the mouse you can get audio and a translation for any verse or word. My Old Norse is minimal, but when I try it I find I can follow reasonably well.

Post in this thread or message me if you're interested in taking part! If you have suggestions about how improve the online text, even better.

[Neil]

Can you send me a link to the web page please?

[Manny]

Neil wrote: "Can you send me a link to the web page please?"

Here it is:

https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/researc...

I have posted background at:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I see you know about Old Norse literature, would love to hear what you think of this! I am sure it can be improved in many ways.

[Neil]

At a quick look, the text looks fine. It would probably benefit from some sort of intro exploring the text and a glossary. Maybe an interactive glossary like on Kiernan’s Electronic Beowulf would be fun.

[Manny]

Thank you very much, we feel encouraged! We will follow up on your suggestions. I didn't know about Electronic Beowulf, we are now looking at it.

[Neil]

I don’t know how the web based Electronic Beowulf works but the CD-ROM version works by if you click your browser over a word in the text, a pop up box appears with a glossary on the specific word. It really is an handy little feature.

[Manny]

In the interactive Völuspá, we're doing things slightly differently; hovering over a word plays audio and shows a popup translation, clicking shows a concordance page with an optional note. The words marked in red are the ones with notes. We need to experiment with Electronic Beowulf and get a feeling for what the issues are.

It's great to get some pointers into this community! I am not myself a medievalist, basically a computational linguistics/language technology person with a strong interest in language and literature. But we have people in the project who are much more serious about medieval literature than I am.

[Neil]

Sorry, my fault, I didn’t click on any of the words. Going to look deeper at this and get back to you, it’s good.

[Manny]

Thank you again!

Matt Butterweck has constructed a LARA version of the Nibelungenlied, but it seems to be offline at the moment. I will ping him now :)

[Neil]

The Nibelungenlied is my favourite. Send me a link to that please.

[Manny]

I'm sure Matt will have restored it soon, he or I will post here when it's back.

[Matt]

Manny wrote: "I'm sure Matt will have restored it soon, he or I will post here when it's back."

I just sent you a mail explaining why my site is currently down.

[Matt]

Neil wrote: "The Nibelungenlied is my favourite. Send me a link to that please."

Hi Neil. In a joined effort Manny and I were able to upload the LARA version of the Nibelungenlied to a new location. You'll find it here:

https://www.issco.unige.ch/en/researc...

[Neil]

It’s great, love the audio on it. What next, the Klage or Kudrun?

[Matt]

Neil wrote: "It’s great, love the audio on it. What next, the Klage or Kudrun?"

Actually I'm currently reading Thomas Mann's Der Erwählte, which, as I learned, is some kind of re-telling of Hartmut von Aues Gregorius. So that might be an interesting project for a Middle High German LARA content, but I haven't found a suitable version of Aue's work yet.

[Neil]

There’s the new editions of Hartmann’s Arthurian texts published by DS Brewer, they’re good.

[Matt]

That sounds appealing too.

And I really have to learn to spell the name Hartmann right :)

[Neil]

I’m surprised I still remembered the spelling, it was years ago when I read him.

[Manny]

Neil, thank you for the tip about the Electronic Beowulf! I'm embarrassed to say that until then I hadn't even heard of it. Have been looking, it's very good. The guy who does the audio is impressive. We need to find someone who can read Old Norse like that :)

[Neil]

http://www.sd-editions.com/aelfric/in... there’s this one in progress too but seems to be moving slowly.

[Manny]

Thank you again! I will tell my Icelandic colleagues that they need to get in contact with some of the other groups doing this stuff :)

[Manny]

We have a new and greatly improved version of the online Völuspá posted here. Ingibjörg Þórisdóttir, who has recorded the audio, is just terrific. We've also cleaned up the translations and put in a nice feature implemented by Matt which highlights each line of the text as the audio is played.

We're still doing our final tidying pass, but we'll be finished in a few days - we can commit to starting the reading group next Saturday, Mar 6. I was thinking that we could start by doing six verses a week, discussing online the way people usually do with these groups. Please join us!

[Manny]

This page contains links to numerous translations of the Völuspá - Branislav and I referred to it frequently when we were cleaning up the annotations. The one we thought closest to the original was Scudder 2001. For people who know a Scandinavian language, we liked Afzelius 1808, where the translator has taken considerable pains to make it sound like the Old Norse.