Towards a digital edition of Waldere’s fragments

Abstract

“Towards a digital edition of Waldere’s fragments” is a project aimed to create the first prototype of a scholarly digital edition of Anglosaxonica Fragmenta duo membranacea, poetica, de Rege Walthero, an Old English fragmentary heroic poem of the 11th century. My work is divided into two parts: the first one concentrates on the fragments, on the previous editions of Waldere and on the textual tradition. In the second one, I explain and motivate the editorial choices behind my digital edition of Waldere’s fragments. I start my thesis introducing the main features of the heroic poetry, considering the relevance of the genre for the Medieval Germanic tradition and to which these fragments pertain. Their popularity, which is demonstrated by various continental analogues of the legend itself, together with a detailed examination of the manuscript and of previous studies conducted on the subject, represent the core of the second chapter. Only after contextualising the work, I consider the central aspects of scholarly digital editing—such as its paradigm and the usage of mark-up language, but to highlight its perks, I concentrate also on the non-digital environment connected to the issue. The last and fourth chapter embodies the ecdotic part of this thesis, since in it I explain the editorial choices I apply to create my edition, and whose outcomes are visible thanks to Edition Visualization Technology Version Beta2 a dedicated software used to display digital editions.