A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose / Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog is a rich and detailed semantic analysis of the lexicon of Old Norse that is founded on the material record of the corpus. The project is hosted at the University of Copenhagen and part of the Arnamagnæan Institute. ONP accounts for the vocabulary of medieval Icelandic and Norwegian prose texts, from around 1150 to 1370 (Norway) and 1540 (Iceland). The dictionary material is the result of
extensive excerption work mostly from scholarly editions of manuscript texts and in some cases directly from manuscripts.
The groundbreaking digital Registre // Indices (first published in 1989) and the later dictionary entries have always been closely linked, particularly since the major digitisation project of 2005-2009, so that all citations are connected in detail to the editions and manuscripts from which they have been excerpted. Since its launch in 2010 the online version of ONP has given access to the available dictionary material with expanded search capabilities and scanned citation slips and text editions.
In 2019 the online version was relaunched with a totally new interface to ONP. This builds further on this wealth of data to provide additional resources for those reading and interpreting Old Norse texts and genres, as well as interfacing with other digital projects in the field, particularly Digitale Samlinger, Handrit, Menota and the Skaldic Project.
This roundtable is a type of workshop that demonstrates many of these new features, as well as different ways in which they can be used to support research into Old Norse language and texts, such as generating glossaries to scholarly editions, accessing foreign parallels, linking to older dictionary resources, manuscript images and electronic text editions and so on. We also present possibilities for semantic analysis and categorisation with a variety of criteria, which may help support projects in different disciplines related to Old Norse studies. The roundtable is organized in three papers: “How it’s made: A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose” (Simonetta Battista & Tarrin Wills), “Ever changing, ever growing: Editing and expanding ONP” (Ellert Þór Jóhannsson & Johnny F. Lindholm), and “An Old Norse multitool: Using the digital ONP” (Tarrin Wills & Pernille Ellyton).