Old Norse Texts in the Digital World. 25th Anniversary of the Medieval Nordic Text Archive

A symposium held by the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and the University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Medieval Nordic Text Archive (MENOTA).

Thursday, September 10, 2026, at 13.00–17.00

Programme

13:00-13:15: Opening

Guðrún Nordal, director of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies

Beeke Stegmann, chair of Menota

13:15-14:15: MENOTA’s first 25 years

Chair: Haraldur Bernharðsson

Odd Einar Haugen, University of Bergen: Menota at 25: Versatility, Fairness and Endings

Paul Maurer, University of Bergen Library: Annotating and exploring Medieval Nordic texts

14:15-14:45: Coffee break

14:45-15:45: MENOTA’s future

Chair: Peder Gammeltoft

Tarrin Wills, University of Copenhagen : Extending the Menota ‘Model’

Beeke Stegmann, Árni Magnússon Institute Menota’s role in Old Norse Studies

15:45-17:00: Reception

The symposium will be conducted in English. All are welcome to attend.

The event will be streamed [here].

The event is made possible by financial support from the Danish-Icelandic Working Group on Old Icelandic Manuscripts, the University of Iceland and Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands.

See abstracts below.

Odd Einar Haugen

Menota at 25: Versatility, Fairness and Endings

Menota has by now developed into a comprehensive archive of Medieval Nordic texts having amassed more than two million words. Menota offers texts on up to three levels of representation (facsimile, diplomatic and normalised). In addition, many texts present parallel photographic facsimiles and partial or full morphological annotation (one million words). Two texts even provide a parallel translation sentence by sentence as well as a full syntactic dependency analysis. Recently, the archive has been extended with several Menota-related projects. As Menota continues to grow, attention is also being given to advancing its alignment with the FAIR principles and supporting its long-term continuity.

Odd Einar Haugen is professor emeritus of Old Norse Philology at the University of Bergen. He was among the founders of Menota and MUFI in 2001 and is the general editor of The Menota Handbook.

Paul Meurer

Annotating and exploring Medieval Nordic texts

Korpuskel is an application for annotating, exploring and displaying encoded texts in general and the texts of Menota in particular. Since 2005, the interface of Korpuskel has been extended to show paginated text, to display photographic facsimiles and corresponding translations, and to link each word in a text to its morphological annotation and a corresponding dictionary entry. Full syntactic dependency analyses, which some texts are equipped with, can also be shown. With the integrated Menota Lemmatization Assistant (MLA), normalization, lemmatization and full morphological annotation of a text can easily be performed in a semi-automatic manner.

Paul Meurer has been working in the fields of computational and corpus linguistics since 1996. He is employed at the Bergen University Library.

Tarrin Wills

Extending the Menota ‘Model’

Menota treats medieval texts as unique and manuscript-based, while adding a corpus linguistic layer. This powerful model can be extended to make use of new technologies and interface with new standards, such as automatic text recognition, spatial analysis of the manuscript page, and analysis of variation. These technologies can help in both the digitisation of Nordic manuscripts and their publication. This presentation demonstrates how Menota’s core model can be adapted to these innovations, highlighting practical applications from the MenotaG application and the Editiones Arnamagnæanæ Electronicæ digital series to show what the future holds for preserving and exploring medieval text collections.

Tarrin Wills is head of the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose at the University of Copenhagen. He has led and co-led digital editing and standardisation projects in Old Norse and related fields including the Skaldic Project, MUFI and EAE.

Beeke Stegmann

Menota's role in Old Norse Studies

Menota plays a central role in preserving and publishing digital transcriptions of Old Norse texts, and its encoding has become a de facto standard in the field. As the archive grows, so does its visibility and scholarly value. Its open-source policies have for instance supported numerous peer-reviewed publications and its data have been used to train an HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) model. Scholars and the wider public regularly consult Menota’s editions. To sustain this momentum in an increasingly digital field, we aim to keep the threshold for including new texts and recruiting new contributors low.

Beeke Stegmann is Associate Research Professor at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík. She is currently the chair of the Medieval Nordic Text Archive — MENOTA.