Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog/A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, 1: A-Bam.Helle Degnbol

Abstract

Reviews 501 HELLE DEGNBOL et al., eds., Ordbog over det norrane prosasprog/A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, 1: A-bam. With accompanying spiralbound Key. Copenhagen: Arnamagnseanske Kommission, 1995. Pp. viii, cols. 906. Key. pp. 122. DKr 250.The publication of the first volume of the monumental Dictionary of Old Norse Prose (ONP) is an event to be celebrated by all scholars and students interested in Old Norse language, literature, and culture. Underway since 1939, the project, when complete, will consist of eleven volumes containing dictionary entries with a twelfth volume (published in 1989) of indices of all the sources. ONP covers the vocabulary of prose writings of Old Norse transmitted in medieval Icelandic and Norwegian manuscripts. The earliest texts are from ca. 1150; Old Icelandic sources continue down to 1500, Old Norwegian down to 1370. Printed editions provide the main sources for the database, but the editors have also excerpted directly from manuscripts in cases where a text has not been published or the existing edition is judged inadequate. Words registered but not given full treatment include principally poetical words and nonassimilated foreign words; these are marked according to category ("poet." or "alien.") with references to the dictionaries where they are treated fully. Onomastic material is limited to bynames and names given to artifacts. All information in ONP is written in both Danish and English. Each word entry contains a lemma, a body, and a tail. The lemma includes the headword with its grammatical classification and details of inflection. Headwords are normalized according to the reconstruction of early-thirteenth-century orthography, the spelling with which most users are familiar, and the morphological information is fuller than in earlier Old Norse dictionaries. The body of the article consists of definitions (of the type the editors call "translation equivalents"), numerous examples of syntactic constructions, and supporting citations from the sources; the earliest example of each headword is always included among the citations and clearly marked. The tail contains information on compounds, dictionaries and glossaries that have treated the headword, and a list of secondary works consulted in writing the entry.The first volume of ONP is accompanied by a Key, containing a user's guide, corrections to the 1989 volume of indices, a bibliography to ONP 1, and a list of abbreviations and symbols. Explanations in the user's guide are clear and concise, a feature that characterizes the dictionary in general. What remains unclear is why the information in the Key was published as a separate booklet instead of at the beginning of the first volume of word entries, the normal place for such material in dictionaries.The completed ONP will contain considerably more words (ca. 30-40 percent) than existing Old Norse dictionaries. In addition to its extensive coverage, there are several other features that should make ONP the definitive dictionary of Old Norse prose. Chief among these from the...