About
There is nothing else in literature quite like the Icelandic sagas. Gritty but funny, epic but understated, foreign but familiar. They perfectly capture a moment in time, a place, and its people.
Reading the sagas in Old Norse is not easy. It is a tricky language, and though there are excellent books, old and new, there are not many of them. As far as I know there is nothing digital or interactive for learning Old Norse or reading the sagas; modern Icelandic has a little, but not much. This is an attempt at one: every word of every saga glossed, which AI finally made cheap enough to do.
The texts are sourced from the Icelandic Saga Database, which has put the sagas online in the public domain, and Menota, which has published a scholarly transcription of Möðruvallabók including a full grammatical analysis on nearly every word.
Maps, character lists and audio will follow, saga by saga as resources allow. A mobile app is also on the roadmap.
Questions, comments and corrections welcome: bokastadir@gmail.com. Glosses are generated by AI and may contain errors.
— Charlie
Old Norse *
Some of the sagas here were only available in modern Icelandic digital editions. Modern Icelandic remains extremely close to Old Norse, but the difference is noticeable. Old Norse * is our attempt to reconstruct Old Norse orthography from a modern Icelandic text, to make it feel more like the real thing.
Most of the differences between the two are regular, and purely a matter of spelling. maður was maðr, og was ok, hönd was hǫnd. From testing against parallel texts, we believe the reconstruction is over 90% accurate. The rest stays as modern Icelandic, still legible in context.
This is meant as a representation, not a true manuscript. For the real thing, the Íslenzk fornrit editions are the standard scholarly text, published by Hið íslenzka fornritafélag: fornrit.is.