This paper contributes to the conference theme of History and introduces an online catalogue of an early modern library: the main digital output of the author's individual research project “Icelandic Scribes” (2016-2018 at the University of Copenhagen). The project has investigated the patronage of manuscripts by Icelander Magnús Jónsson í Vigur (1637-1702), his network of scribes and their working practices, and the significance of the library of handwritten books that he accumulated during his lifetime, in the region of Iceland called the Westfjords. The online catalogue is meant to be a digital resource that reunites this library virtually, gives detailed descriptions of the manuscripts, and highlights the collection's rich store of texts and the individuals behind their creation. The present paper also explores some of the challenges of integrating new data produced by this and other small projects like it with existing online resources in the field of Old Norse-Icelandic studies. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 654825.
The EU-funded project “Icelandic Scribes” has over the past two years conducted
research into a collection of manuscripts that has previously been praised as being
largely representative of the vast majority of the literature available in Iceland in the
seventeenth century [
The seventeenth century in particular was a time that saw a renewed flourishing of
manuscript production in Iceland that had a lasting impact on scribal culture and book
production in later centuries. There has accordingly been a recent increase in new
research covering this period of Icelandic literary and cultural history, especially
through the consideration of the manuscripts themselves and the circumstances of their
production [
Whereas manuscripts were still written out by hand just as they had been for
centuries during the Middle Ages, the appearance of these early modern Icelandic
manuscripts, now almost always copied onto paper instead of parchment, was in many
cases also strongly influenced by the physical appearance of early modern printed
books, especially, for example, title pages [
Research outputs from the “Icelandic Scribes” project include a series of up-to-date
electronically encoded catalogue descriptions (following TEI standards for XML
encoding) of the manuscripts in Magnús Jónsson’s seventeenth-century collection, as
well as an online resource that is, as of February 2018, newly launched [
The first of the existing digital resources is Handrit.org [
A certain amount of data overlap, although far from ideal, is likewise unavoidable with the creation of an online resource for the “Icelandic Scribes” project, as new descriptions not covered by either of the existing catalogues just mentioned cannot necessarily be easily added to them. In the case of the online materials from the “Stories for All Time” project, its nature as a self-contained research project that has since ended, not to mention its strict scope in terms of literary genre — that is, manuscripts containing fornaldarsögur (sagas of ancient times, also sometimes called legendary sagas) — rules out the possibility of integrating the new data generated by the “Icelandic Scribes” project. In a similar manner, the platform provided by Handrit.org, while more inclusive in terms of the exponentially greater number of manuscripts containing texts from all genres instead of only one, is at the same time also more limited in terms of the scope of participating institutions.
There is not at present a ready mechanism to include manuscripts from institutions that are not already among the small list of contributing partners. At the same time, individual studies of literary corpora and the manuscripts in which they are preserved should of course not be restricted to items held by institutions that are involved in existing digital projects and resources. This tension between existing resources and initiatives on the one hand, and smaller projects and studies with targeted objectives and research questions on the other, poses challenges for the creation and augmentation of data. 2.3
However, a great benefit gained from the creation of a separate, self-contained online resource for the material produced by the “Icelandic Scribes” project is its ability to digitally reunite a now disparate group of manuscripts housed in various institutions in northern Europe. To be able to more easily conceptualise this small group of handwritten books as something that was at a point in the past a carefully curated collection owned by a single wealthy individual thus invites fresh perspectives on the reception of medieval and early modern literature in Iceland at the time of the collection’s creation in the seventeenth century. The reunification of Magnús Jónsson’s library in digital form also provides an opportunity to consider the afterlives of these books and how they made their way from one private library on an island in the Westfjords of Iceland (now a relatively remote area, but then a well-connected hub) to their various current institutions. Above and beyond the various electronic manuscript descriptions (which moreover include a greater level of detail than many existing descriptions, see Fig. 1), the project’s digital catalogue also presents historical research generated by the project, providing context for, and interpretation of, some of the data. It aims in this way to be much more than simply yet one more online catalogue.
Further work within the field of digital Old Norse-Icelandic studies is required to move towards standardising disparate catalogues and other projects with digital components that include information about the same items, in order to make it possible to reliably recombine them if and when it may be deemed necessary by, for example, third-party sites and projects in the future. The most basic requirement should be first and foremost to agree upon a standard set of identifiers for a wide range of individual items that have come under investigation in digital projects and catalogues, that is, the plethora of manuscripts, texts, genres, authors, scribes, historical and modern locations, etc. Such is, unfortunately, not as straightforward a task as might be hoped.
Beyond the standardisation of identifiers, a system of project/resource crossreferencing should also, ideally, be developed and incorporated, first, into the various existing online resources and, subsequently, into each new digital project resource. Existing catalogue entries could link directly to other versions of the data that are presented on other project websites on an entry by entry basis, and the homepages of existing resources could likewise acknowledge and link to each other. Such a system of cross-referencing would make it easier to locate, compare, and contrast the relevant data generated by different digital resources, allowing historians, codicologists, those who study literature, and others to use and build on it in future research. To the extent that this is possible, the “Icelandic Scribes” project website has endeavoured to crossreference and link to other catalogue descriptions (see Fig. 2).
Alternatively (or in addition to a cross-referencing system), a single curated online
space that could be regularly and easily updated and that gathers together links to the
disparate online resources could also be something to work towards in the field so as to
increase the visibility and reach of small project outputs alongside larger ones. It is
needless to say that, going forward, more collaboration in the field is highly important,
although this has so far been to a certain extent difficult to establish and maintain — a
sentiment that has been indicated in a recent overview of the state of digital humanities
in Old Norse-Icelandic studies [
Information about the manuscripts, scribes, and patron under investigation by the “Icelandic Scribes” project has never before been gathered together as a cohesive whole, neither in print nor digitally. Previous work has instead tended to consider, in isolation, individual texts preserved within various manuscripts in the collection, usually for the purposes of textual criticism alone [e.g. 5], or Magnús Jónsson’s role in the greater phenomenon of the renewal of early modern Icelandic manuscript production [e.g. 16].
By taking a wider view of Magnús Jónsson’s collection and also considering individual manuscripts as examples of the work of individual scribes done for an individual patron, the project has also produced significant historical findings now in progress and awaiting print publication [e.g. 10, 11]. These deal with for example the ways in which scribes carried out their work both individually and in collaboration with each other, the preferences held by their patron, and the different types of relationships evident between scribe and patron. These findings have been arrived at through historical and codicological research involving the consideration of for example paratextual features of the manuscripts such as title pages, indexes, and scribal notes. By considering the production circumstances of the manuscripts, insights have also been gained into how Magnús Jónsson as patron wished to access and read the stories these books contained, something which has had a lasting impact on the transmission and preservation of medieval Icelandic literature.
The dual-stranded outlook of the project — both digital and historical with a strong emphasis on the analysis of manuscripts — has yielded important results that would not necessarily have been possible had the project relied solely on single-discipline, traditional methods. It is in turn hoped that the digital output of the project will also support further research on the manuscripts, their texts, and the people who copied and read them, from historical, literary, codicological, and other perspectives. To name just one example of an area of further research that the digital outputs might support, there is still far too little work on the post-medieval transmission history of Old NorseIcelandic literature. The catalogue descriptions, which include detailed incipits and explicits for all texts, could be useful indicators (in the first instance, before studying the physical manuscripts) of which versions of the text are preserved in these manuscripts. This is something that has not been possible to investigate in the present project, given that the manuscripts in Magnús Jónsson’s library encompasses over 250 individual texts. Related to this, the identification of some of the texts preserved in these manuscripts still remains to be done, particularly when it comes to sets of aevintýri (exempla or short tales) that, until now, have not been itemised.
The outputs of the “Icelandic Scribes” project can furthermore be seen as case studies on which future studies of other concentrated groups of manuscripts or scribes could be modelled, especially when it comes to the significant amount of material available from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Iceland that still remains to be investigated. 4
No existing online resource in Old Norse-Icelandic studies currently accounts for all of the manuscripts known to have been part of the remarkable collection of the seventeenth-century Icelander Magnús Jónsson í Vigur, despite there being significant ongoing efforts to catalogue and make available manuscript images and des criptions through both long-term collaborative projects spanning multiple institutions in different countries (like Handrit.org) and short-term smaller-scale collaborative projects (like “Stories for All Time”). Despite a limited but necessary amount of data duplication, the digital catalogue of the “Icelandic Scribes” project builds on some of the open data generated by these existing resources and at the same time produces new data for manuscripts that lie beyond their current reach: the mutual acknowledgement of different online resources and more work in the field towards the standardisation of data may allow for the future integration of competing (and complementary) data sets.
The “Icelandic Scribes” project offers furthermore a new online resource with both a broader focus and a narrower scope than the existing resources discussed in this paper, as it is more than just a catalogue listing manuscripts’ contents and physical properties. Rather, the project’s digital output focuses on bringing together, virtually, a small collection of highly bespoke hand-written books, and in many cases creates more detailed data about the texts that these books contain. A special focus is moreover placed on paratextual materials in order to present a clearer picture of the people behind the manuscripts, both scribes and patron. Finally, the use of existing digital materials alongside the creation of new ones has enhanced those project outputs which are, more strictly speaking, historical.