Codex Runicus (AM 28 8vo): A pilot project for encoding a runic manuscript

Abstract

The topic of this paper is to show the process of the encoding of fol. 25v of Codex Runicus, AM 28 8vo. More specifically, this manuscript has been chosen as a pilot project since it has been written entirely in runes and it is thus eminently suited for testing the XML encoding of a runic manuscript. This has to the best of my knowledge not been done before. To this aim I used the Oxygen XML Editor to produce the encoding of the text in compliance with the Menota (Medieval Nordic Text Archive) Guidelines of Handbook v. 3.0, a detailed manual of how to encode medieval manuscripts in XML, and the last version P5 of the TEI standard. The paper aims at presenting the Codex Runicus and its runes, and then showing the process of encoding the runes, the punctuation marks and of the linguistic analysis (lexical and grammatical) of the selected text. This pilot project is the basis of my current PhD research project, which aims at encoding the whole manuscript on the basis of the procedure shown in this paper.