--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Scott" <Scat@...> wrote:

>
> My problem is that every time I locate an Old Norse text, it seems

to have

> been regularized and modernized.
>
> My interests lie in medieval languages-not the modern editing of such
> languages. The same is true of
>
> Old English texts but they normally admit their 'sin' in the preface or
> foreword.

Hi Scott,

There are many scholarly editions of Old Norse texts printed in the
manuscript spelling. Here are a few online examples of transcribed
texts and facsimiles:

http://icarus.umkc.edu/sandbox/saga/index.html
http://web.hist.uib.no/bente/tekstar/morkinskinna/mork1.txt
http://www.onp.hum.ku.dk/litindex.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=_GcJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage#PPP9,M1

http://am.hi.is/WebView/

There's also an online edition of Gylfaginning with the texts of the
four principle manuscripts; you can view them in original spelling
(stafréttir) or normalized (samræmdir). Several of the texts at the
Septentrionalia site are in the original manuscript spelling [
http://www.septentrionalia.net/etexts/index.php ], for example
Hómilíubók and Grágás which are especially interesting for their
archaic features. Saganet has many facsimile editions of manuscripts
(although the majority are post-medieval) and out-of-print books
[ http://saga.library.cornell.edu/ and http://sagnanet.is/ ]. I can't
recall which off the top of my head, but there are probably others
among the texts listed here [
http://www.oe.eclipse.co.uk/nom/norselinks.htm#texts ] - which retain
the manuscript spelling, try the old editions at Google Books. Some of
the texts at Septentrionalia are also available there in what might be
a more convenient format, depending on your purposes.

Good luck tracking them down!

LN