Fyrirlestrar/Lectures

Ondřej Tichý

Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online

The Story of a Dictionary and its Digitization

Fimmtudaginn 9. apríl 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, April 9, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

The Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by Joseph Bosworth and T. N. Toller has been the leading lexicographical resource in the study of Old English since its publication over a century ago. However, for that same period of time it has also proven to be a highly contentious resource and sometimes downright an irritating tool to use. This talk will briefly introduce the history of the Dictionary and it use, but the focus will be squarely on the project of its digitization that has over the years lead to the online application used almost two million times every year at bosworthtoller.com.

The aim of this digitization project has been to create a faithful representation of what the printed Dictionary has to offer and present it freely online for the widest audiences adding new features made possible by its transformation.

The talk will cover the history of the project and the basic methodology of the digitization — from OCR to XML and finally the online app. It will introduce the educational or pedagogical aspects of its development; the tools and standards similar digitization projects may or should use and the follow-up projects that may be encouraged by the adherence to these standards.

Finally, it will also tackle the technical and lexicographical difficulties encountered during the development: such as the structural inconsistency of the Dictionary, the level of fidelity in its digital representation, the disambiguation of some of its data and the reliability of its sources. These are shown to be on one hand common to all similar digitization efforts, but on the other hand often intimately associated with the peculiar history of the Dictionary that may, in its new digital form, finally overcome some of its limitation and after more than 150 years realise its full potential online.

Ondřej Tichý is currently the deputy head of the Department of Linguistics and the head of the Center for Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) in Prague. Among his research interests are historical corpus linguistics, quantitative analysis and digital humanities. He has worked on topics such as lexical and multi-word mortality, quantitative analysis of spelling variation, grammaticalization of countability, quantitative typology, automatic morphological analysis and lemmatization and digital lexicography. He is the author of the online version of the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. He is currently working on a number of digital projects including Lexico-semantic Database of Czech, a database of medieval Czech textual sources in translation, an online tool for visualisation of diachronic change in collocations and LLM benchmarking tools for DH.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.

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Fyrirlestrar / Lectures

Árni Einarsson

Akuryrkja á Suðurlandi á miðöldum

Nýir fornleifafundir

Fimmtudaginn 19. mars 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, March 19, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

Fjöldi merkja eru um kornyrkju hér á landi á miðöldum og virðist hún hafa verið útbreidd, einkum sunnan- og vestanlands. Má þar nefna fornleifar á bæjum, frjókornagreiningar á jarðvegi, sögurnar og máldaga kirkna og önnur fornbréf. Hingað til hafa örugg, sýnileg merki akra verið fá og bundin við sjávarsíðuna vestanlands, einkum Garðskaga og Breiðafjarðareyjar, en einnig á tveimur bæjum í Mýrdalnum. Í erindinu verður sagt frá fornökrum sem nýlega fundust við fornleifarannsóknir í Rangárvallasýslu. Komu þeir í ljós við hnitmiðaðar loftmyndatökur af fornum bæjarstæðum. Akrarnir eru á Keldum, Bergvaði (nú Móeiðarhvoli), Skeiðvöllum og Lunansholti.

Fornakrarnir á Keldum á Rangárvöllum tengjast flóknu og hugvitsamlegu áveitukerfi frá 10.–11. öld, þar sem Keldnalæk var veitt um annars þurra Tunguheiði með torfhlöðnum stokkum og stíflugörðum. Af 19 hekturum sem áveitan vökvaði á Tunguheiði eru 3 hektarar með sýnilegum akurrákum. Akrar á Bergvaði (1 hektari) tengjast torfgirðingakerfi sem virðist gefa til kynna talsverða nautgriparækt. Kynnt verður hugmynd um hvernig sauðfjár og nautgriparækt hefur verið fyrir komið þar til forna. Akrar í Lunansholti (0,3 hektarar hinn stærri) og á Skeiðvöllum eru á fornum bæjarstæðum með fjölda tófta, sumum með þeim stærri af sinni gerð. Stærsti akurinn af þremur á Skeiðvöllum er 2,2 hektarar að stærð, hinir tveir 0,8 og 1 ha.

Þessir fornleifafundir eru sérstakt fagnaðarefni fyrir það hve akurlöndin eru lítt röskuð og öll umgjörð þeirra óspillt. Frekari rannsóknir munu geta skilað miklum upplýsingum um akuryrkju á Íslandi á miðöldum, til dæmis hvenær hún hófst og hvenær henni lauk, hvað var ræktað, hve mikill áburður var notaður, hvort fleiri akrar leynist undir yfirborðinu og margt, margt fleira.

Árni Einarsson er líf- og fornvistfræðingur, fyrrum forstöðumaður Náttúrurannsóknastöðvarinnar við Mývatn og gestaprófessor við Háskóla Íslands um skeið. Hann hefur lengst af helgað sig rannsóknum á lífríki og sögu Mývatns, en einnig á fornminjum og bókmenntum frá miðöldum.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á íslensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in Icelandic and is open to all.

Fyrirlestrar / Lectures

Dick Harrison

The Era of Evil

The Development of Witch Persecutions and Trials in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth century

Fimmtudaginn 19. febrúar 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, February 19, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

In the early Middle Ages, the Christian church of Europe regarded magic in much the same way that we do today. It was regarded as superstition, as a bundle of ideas that should be combatted not because they could result in real harm, but because they were stupid. Since all power emanated from God, the very notion that Satan or one of his demons could be called upon to render assistance to witches and wizards was nonsense. Hence, witches and wizards were not taken seriously, and they could be (and were) used in stories and plays as elements of entertainment.

However, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, this attitude began to change. In the 1320s, the pope himself acknowledged that magic users should be taken seriously, for the same reason that heretics were to be feared. Since heretics—i.e., Cathars and Valdensians—did exist and, moreover, caused serious harm to Christianity, it was only logical to assume that they were inspired by Satan and the forces of evil. In all probability, these dark powers also tried to exert influence over the world by employing witches and wizards. Accordingly, practitioners of magic were to be dealt with in the same fashion as heretics: by investigations and persecutions and, as a last resort, by burning at the stake.

This was the beginning of a development that created an atmosphere of fear of magic that resulted in sporadic eruptions of witch hunts. Eventually, tens of thousands of innocent Europeans were tried and killed, with a culmination in the seventeenth century. The processes varied considerably: for example, the vast majority of the victims in continental Europe were women, while the majority of the Icelandic victims were men. In present-day Estonia and Latvia, there were few witch trials but many werewolf trials. In Spain, some of the biggest persecutions of the era were launched, but they were quenched by the Inquisition, since this well-trained ecclesiastical court demanded reliable pieces of evidence. In Sweden, on the other hand, many women were condemned to death simply because local children made up stories about their alleged visits to Blåkulla, where they were supposed to have made pacts with the Devil.

How was this possible? Why did learned intellectuals embrace popular ideas that had previously been regarded as ludicrous? And why did the witch craze stop? What made judges, priests and princes realise that the accused were innocent?

Dick Harrison is Professor of History at Lund University in Sweden. He has published more than a hundred books on various historical subjects, with a major focus on the Middle Ages. His book about the Black Death was rewarded the August Prize for best Swedish non-fiction book in 2000, and he was the editor (and a major contributor) to the eight-volume work Sveriges historia (“The History of Sweden”). Harrison appears frequently as an expert in Swedish radio and television.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á ensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in English and is open to all.

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Fyrirlestrar / Lectures

Helgi Þorláksson

Klofasteinar fyrir norðan

Geta klofasteinar sagt eitthvað um landnám Íslands og þá hvað helst?

Fimmtudaginn 5. febrúar 2026 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, February 5, 2026, at 16.30
Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

Fyrirlesari birti grein árið 2023 þar sem settar eru fram ábendingar um að stórtækir landnámsmenn á Íslandi muni hafa getað ákveðið hvar mörk skyldu vera milli svæða eða stórra jarða sem þeir námu og útdeildu. Vísbendingar um þetta taldi fyrirlesari vera allstóra, klofna steina, svonefnda klofasteina, á mörkum á Suðurlandi, suðvesturhorni landsins og í Borgarfirði, alls 34 dæmi. Hann rökstuddi að steinarnir hefðu iðulega fengið þetta hlutverk á elstu tíð. Fyrirlesari ber núna saman við 39 klofasteina á mörkum í þremur sýslum nyrðra, Húnavatnssýslu, Skagafjarðarsýslu og Eyjafjarðarsýslu.

Helgi Þorláksson er prófessor emeritus í sagnfræði við Háskóla Íslands. Hann fékkst í kennslu og rannsóknum einkum við Íslands- og Norðurlandasögu frá um 900 til um 1800, svið pólitískrar sögu, félagssögu og hagsögu. Doktorsritgerð hans fjallar um hagsögu Íslands á 13. og 14. öld og náin tengsl við Noreg.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á íslensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in Icelandic and is open to all.

Málþing / Symposium

Report on Rímur 2026: New Directions in Rímur Research

Málþing á vegum Miðaldastofu Háskóla Íslands — A University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies Symposium

Föstudaginn 23. janúar 2026 kl. 14.00-16.30 — Friday, January 23, 2026, at 14.00-16.30

Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) — Edda auditorium (E-103)

Dagskrá — Programme

• 14.00–14.30 Lena Rohrbach (University of Basel/University of Zürich): Kveða eins og fellur í buccam: Critical Approaches to Rímur in the Eighteenth Century
• 14.30–15.00 Natalie M. Van Deusen (University of Alberta): From Saga to Rímur: The Case of St. Agnes of Rome
• 15.00–15.30 Kaffihlé — Coffee break
• 15.30–16.00 Teresa Dröfn Freysdóttir Njarðvík (Stofnun Árna Magnússonar): The Neverending Story: Kaleidoscopic Narrative Elements and Cultural Memory in Rímur and Rímur-Derived Prose
• 16.00–16.30 Katelin Marit Parsons (University of Iceland/Stofnun Árna Magnússonar): Riches to Rag Paper: Rímur in Manuscript Culture After 1550

Árið 1955 birti Stefán Einarsson greinargerð um rímnakveðskap, „Report on Rímur“, í bandaríska tímaritinu Journal of English and Germanic Philology (JEGP). Aldarfjórðungi síðar sendi Shaun Hughes frá sér greinargerð um helstu rannsóknir á rímnakveðskap síðan 1955: „Report on Rímur 1980“. Áhugi á rímnakveðskap hefur aukist mikið undanfarin ár eins og sjá má á nýjum rannsóknum, útgáfum og þýðingum sem opnað hafa þetta rannsóknasvið fyrir nýjum og fjölbreyttum hópi nemenda og rannsakenda. Í þessari greinargerð um rímur 2026 — „Report on Rímur 2026“ — verður sagt frá nýjum rannsóknum á rímum og rímnahefð frá ýmsum hliðum, svo sem handritageymd, efnismenningu og miðlun.

In 1955, Stefán Einarsson published the first “Report on Rímur” in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology (JEGP). Twenty-five years later came Shaun Hughes’ “Report on Rímur 1980,” which covered developments in the field after 1955. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in rímur, with new studies, editions and translations opening up the field to a wider range of students and researchers than ever before. Our “Report on Rímur 2026” showcases recent work on rímur and rímur traditions in their material, medial and academic context. See abstracts below.

Fundarstjóri / Chair: Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir

Kvæðamaður: Þorsteinn Björnsson

Málþingið verður haldið á ensku og er öllum opið. / The symposium will be held in English and is open to all.

Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands — The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies

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Lena Rohrbach

Kveða eins og fellur í buccam

Critical Approaches to Rímur in the Eighteenth Century

The first half of the eighteenth century is the time in which the Arnamagnæan manuscript collection was organized in its final shape following Árni Magnússon’s death in 1730. It is also the period during which the first attempts at histories of Icelandic literature were composed. This paper will approach both these developments with regard to what they reflect about learned approaches to rímur in this first period of Old Norse scholarship.

The placement and categorization of manuscripts containing rímur in the manuscript collection as can be discerned from the first catalogue of the collection by Jón Ólafsson úr Grunnavík and comments on individual manuscripts give insights into conceptualizations of rímur within the overall corpus of texts. The literary histories offer more expansive views of the status and character of this poetic tradition, with considerations of a general kind on the contents, language, metrics, style and (lack of) virtuosity of these poems in relation to both medieval and other contemporary poetic texts, as well as assessments of individual poems.

These early categorizations, definitions and evaluations of rímur both in the organization of the Arnamagnæan archive and in the early literary-historical writings are not only testimonies to the development of Old Norse scholarship at a specific moment in time, but have profoundly influenced and shaped later approaches to this part of Icelandic literary history over the centuries.

Lena Rohrbach is Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the Universities of Basel and Zürich. Her research focuses on late medieval and early modern Icelandic literary traditions in their material and medial context and on premodern critical approaches to this tradition.

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Natalie M. Van Deusen

From Saga to Rímur

The Case of St. Agnes of Rome

The legend of St. Agnes, the thirteen-year-old Christian virgin who was martyred in Rome in ca. 303–304 CE, survives in three Old Norse prose redactions, all of which are translations of the Pseudo-Ambrosian Passio Agnetis. Agnes was the co-patron of two churches in medieval Iceland, and hers was a Holy Day of Obligation during the country’s Catholic period; her prose legend, like those of the other virgin martyrs, seems to have been especially popular among women in religious orders, for whom the legends of virgins probably had their largest audience. There are also several poetic renderings of the legend of St. Agnes in Iceland, from both the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. One of these is a rímnaflokkur, Agnesarrímur, composed in the seventeenth century by Rev. Eiríkur Hallsson í Höfða (1614–1698) for his friend’s young daughter, Hólmfríður Benediktsdóttir; the rímur in four fits are extant in only one manuscript (Lbs 705 4to, ca. 1825–34), but are important, both because they represent a larger trend in adapting the stories of saints and other holy women to rímur but also because they likely were the source for the highly popular Agnesarkvæði, allegedly composed ca. 1725 by Þorvaldur Magnússon and extant in over one hundred manuscripts and audio recordings.

This paper provides an overview of Agnesarrímur and its adaptation of Agnes’ vita and passio. It focuses especially on the relationship between Eiríkur’s rímur and the three extant redactions of Agnesar saga. It also considers the other Latin and vernacular works named in the rímur, on which Eiríkur drew when composing his work. The paper considers when, where, and in what form Eiríkur would have had access to these sources, which by extension lends important insight into the availability of Latin texts and works translated from Latin in early modern Iceland. The paper concludes with a consideration of how the sources Eiríkur consulted for his rímur are reflected – or not – in Þorvaldur Magnússon’s Agnesarkvæði, which became the rímur’s greatest measurable legacy.

Natalie M. Van Deusen is a Professor at the University of Alberta. Her area of research specialization is Old Norse and early modern Icelandic paleography and philology, hagiography, and religious literature, with a focus on women, gender, and disability. She has published several books and numerous book chapters and journal articles related to these topics.

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Teresa Dröfn Freysdóttir Njarðvík

The Neverending Story

Kaleidoscopic Narrative Elements and Cultural Memory in Rímur and Rímur-Derived Prose

The aim of this paper is to shed light on kaleidoscopic narration within the Icelandic rímur tradition and the rímur-derived prose in post-medieval Icelandic literature. Discussing how kaleidoscopic narration manifests within the tradition and pointing out how it can also be seen as an integral part of the tradition itself. It is an established opinion that rímur are usually based on pre-existing narratives, often already recorded in prose form. Most commonly narratives based in legendary sagas, chivalric sagas, king’s sagas and Íslendingasögur were transformed into a rímur composition. In a few cases no prose narratives are preserved pre-dating the rímur composition, suggesting that they are based on now lost narratives. In later rímur, the tradition is expanded and rímur are composed based on material within oral tradition, eddic poetry or other types of narrative poetic forms.

The rímur form itself suggests a kaleidoscopic narrative element – where a narrative in prose form is recast into a poetic form. However, the narrative within the rímur is not slavishly bound to its prose narrative precursor. The rímur narrative might contain a change of emphasis, additional narrative plots, play on generic traits or boundaries or in other ways makes use of the narrative material at hand in an innovative way. These changes within the rímur tradition have even at times resulted in a new prose redaction of the narrative material – even in cases where older prose narratives are preserved. This suggests a certain fluidity within the literary tradition, where narratives flow freely between literary forms, adapting or adding narrative elements all along the way.

Teresa Dröfn Freysdóttir Njarðvík holds a PhD in Icelandic Literature from the University of Iceland and is currently a researcher at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, where she is part of the research project “Riches to Rags: The Popularisation of Rímur Poetry in Post-Medieval Iceland.”

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Katelin Marit Parsons

Riches to Rag Paper

Rímur in Manuscript Culture After 1550

The introduction of rag paper in Icelandic manuscript culture had a transformative impact on poets’ ability to gain access to copies of other poets’ work and to disseminate their own compositions in written form. While premodern rímur are associated with strong performance traditions, late medieval rímur manuscripts seem to have been mainly produced for elite patrons in northwestern Iceland. The publication of the Vísnabók [Book of Verses] at Hólar in 1612 marks a milestone in the development of rímur as a form of popular poetry: for the first time, mass-produced printed books containing rímur became available to households around the island. Prior to this, most Icelanders’ exposure to rímur would have been through encounters with rímur performance.

In my talk, I will introduce the project “Riches to Rags: The Popularisation of Rímur Poetry in Post-medieval Iceland” (Project Leader: Margrét Eggertsdóttir), funded by the Icelandic Research Council (grant no. 2511601-051). Among the project goals is the development of a database of rímur poets active during the period from approximately 1550 to 1725, surviving rímur and associated manuscripts. Building on the extensive work of Finnur Sigmundsson on premodern rímur and rímur poets, we hope to demonstrate the versatility of rímur as a poetic form after 1600 and the increasingly prominent presence of rímur in non-elite manuscript culture.

Katelin Marit Parsons is a co-PI on the project “Riches to Rags: The Popularisation of Rímur Poetry in Post-medieval Iceland” (2025–2028) at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies and an adjunct lecturer at the University of Iceland. She holds a PhD in Icelandic Literature from the University of Iceland.

Miðaldastofa Háskóla Íslands — The University of Iceland Centre for Medieval Studies

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Fyrirlestrar / Lectures

Helgi Þorláksson

Klofasteinar fyrir norðan

Geta klofasteinar sagt eitthvað um landnám Íslands og þá hvað helst?

Fimmtudaginn 27. nóvember 2025 kl. 16.30 / Thursday, November 27, 2025, at 16.30

Frestað vegna veikinda; nýr tími auglýstur síðar.

Fyrirlestrasal Eddu (E-103) / Edda auditorium (E-103)

Fyrirlesari birti grein árið 2023 þar sem settar eru fram ábendingar um að stórtækir landnámsmenn á Íslandi muni hafa getað ákveðið hvar mörk skyldu vera milli svæða eða stórra jarða sem þeir námu og útdeildu. Vísbendingar um þetta taldi fyrirlesari vera allstóra, klofna steina, svonefnda klofasteina, á mörkum á Suðurlandi, suðvesturhorni landsins og í Borgarfirði, alls 34 dæmi. Hann rökstuddi að steinarnir hefðu iðulega fengið þetta hlutverk á elstu tíð. Fyrirlesari ber núna saman við 39 klofasteina á mörkum í þremur sýslum nyrðra, Húnavatnssýslu, Skagafjarðarsýslu og Eyjafjarðarsýslu.

Helgi Þorláksson er prófessor emeritus í sagnfræði við Háskóla Íslands. Hann fékkst í kennslu og rannsóknum einkum við Íslands- og Norðurlandasögu frá um 900 til um 1800, svið pólitískrar sögu, félagssögu og hagsögu. Doktorsritgerð hans fjallar um hagsögu Íslands á 13. og 14. öld og náin tengsl við Noreg.

Fyrirlesturinn verður haldinn á íslensku og er öllum opinn. / The talk will be delivered in Icelandic and is open to all.

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