Digital Approaches to the Survival and Loss of Old Norse Romances

The project examines the survival and loss of Old Norse romances, works heavily influenced by continental genres of the Middle Ages. The goal is to leverage recent developments in digital humanities to uncover which features of texts and their manuscripts may have contributed to the survival and loss of medieval literary works.

Presentation

The genre of romance began to flourish in the North from the thirteenth century onwards, when the earliest known translations of European romances appeared under the patronage of King Hákon Hákonarson of Norway. During this period, Norse translations of continental works were produced in Norway, including works such as Tristan, Élie de Saint Gille, and Yvain, while the earliest legendary sagas were written down in Iceland, narrating the legendary past of Nordic and Germanic heroes like Sigurður the Dragon Slayer and Ragnar Loðbrók. These two related genres of Icelandic literature—riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur—are rarely studied together, despite their transmission histories being closely intertwined.

This project examines the survival and loss of Old Norse romances, broadly understood as medieval chivalric and heroic literature, including works traditionally classified as chivalric sagas (riddarasögur), legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur), and related narrative poems (rímur).

The goal is to leverage recent developments in digital humanities to gather a quantifiable dataset describing key features of medieval texts and their manuscripts. This dataset will be used to apply statistical methods commonly used in ecology, such as unseen species modelling, to estimate the loss rates of works traditionally belonging to different genres of Old Norse literature. We aim to uncover which features of medieval texts and their manuscripts may have had the greatest influence on the diverse transmission paths of medieval chivalric and heroic literature from the North.