Images from
Illustrated by:
Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson sent the manuscript to Sorö, Denmark as a gift for his friend Stephanus Johannis Stephanius in 1639. After his death, Stephanus's widow sold it to the Swedish Chancellor, Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.
Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie donated the Codex Upsaliensis to the Carolina Rediviva Library at the University of Uppsala in 1662.
The purpose of the project was to create a prototype for a digital image repository and web page for illustrations of Old Norse gods and heroes from manuscripts and early print sources.
I used a Roma Schema with the modules:
All proper nouns for the metadata for the illustrations were marked up with TEI P5 by using: <gi>persName</gi> for beings such as gods, giants, humans, authors, illustrators etc. and <gi>name</gi> for animals, monsters, and artifacts. The <att>xml:id</att>s for proper nouns are always mixed case abbreviations that begin with a capital. The <gi>list</gi> elements always have <att>type</att> and usually have <att>subtype</att> as well. All other TEI tags such as: <placeName/> for places, <orgName/> for archives, and <person/> were used in the manner demonstrated by the TEI P5 guidelines. I used the <att>xml:lang</att> for all of these elements. The keyword items for all proper nouns were linked to further descriptive data in a Names directory (names.xml).
I created additional keyword items consisting of simple nouns, which were marked up as <gi>term</gi> to correspond to names of artifacts, animals, and monsters, e.g. Megingjörð = belt, Sleipnir = horse, Jörmungandr = serpent. The keyword items for all simple nouns were also entered in the names.xml file. The <att>xml:id</att>s for simple nouns are not abbreviated, always begin in lower case, are always in English, and are camel back when consisting of more than one word.
The critical approach for the selection of illustrations is focused through the theoretical lens of Material Philology which considers books and their material details, such as covers and illustrations, as cultural artifacts. This selection criteria results in a repository of images that is capable of revealing aspects of book history, culture, and production that the words of the texts alone cannot provide. Consequently, iterations of illustrations with minimal differences are not only included but valued for their research potential, e.g., illustrations from the first and second editions of
The web page prototype for the repository will incorporate Web 2.0 principles to facilitate scholarly research and knowledge dissemination and to enable participation from users at all levels of interest.
Old Norse orthography was the preferred representation for all names, e.g. Þōrr for Thor, and was used in a main title for each illustration with English orthography appearing in a subtitle. Keyword items were created for both Old Norse and English spelling and orthographies.
The spelling conventions for Old Norse conform to the practice established in
The chief god of the Æsir in
Richard Wagner in