Hi Victor,

To my knowledge there is no unified electronic collection
of English saga translations available. The trick would seem
to be to use the Bible:

1. Think of a short English sentence (typically noun + verb).
2. Do a search in an electronic English Bible edition.
3. Once you have found a couple of occurrences of your
sentence in the English Bible, note down OT/NT, Book, Chapter
and Verse.
4. Go to an electronic edition of the Bible in Icelandic,
and find the verses in question.
5. Since the Icelandic Bible translations (how many are there?)
tend to use conservative language, you usually obtain
phrases that are close to Old Icelandic.
But of course, you would need to change the spelling somewhat,
and have some idea about what normalisation of ON you wish
to follow.
6. Fragments of genuine Old Norse Bible language may be found
in the *Homily* books, of which I have seen at least one
electronic edition on the net. But the Homily books mainly
consits of *sermons* that were used some time in the 11th
and 12th centuries. These sermons may for example be translations
of some of the sermons written in Latin, by *Alcuin*, an
English Church man, who worked during the reign of Charlemagne.
(8th century)

Best regards
Xigung


For an English "corpus" of saga translations,
you may consult various internet sites, for example
the "Sun site" in California, or the "Labyrinth" site
at Georgetown. There are probably others too now.
Maybe it would be a good idea to create a unified
web site for such, where as many translations as possible
have been collected in a unified and searchable format.

I should, btw, also like to see elecronic versions made
available as searchable text bases, of *Homer*
(Iliad and Odyssey), as well as the works of *Shakespeare*.
Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings* would also be quite nice
to have as an Icelandic e-text. (together with the
English text in e-format)





--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Victor Hansen <victor_akl_nz@...>
wrote:

>
> hi xigung, thanks for adding in that piece of information!
>
> Tell me, is there an english translated source of Old Norse,

perhaps the Sagas, that an English speaking person like myself could
search through for key words. By finding them in sentences it would
help me and others in how to better group the words together - would
this work?

>
> OR should we be searching for the words in Old Norse first in such

texts as the Sagas and then trying to translate them and the words
that surround them?

>
> Regards.
>
> xigung <xigung@...> wrote:
> But the thing with old language forms is that you can never be

quite sure exactly what words they would have chosen, because it is a
dead language now. That is why I prefer to find old text fragments,
because that's the only way you can be sure that someone actually
would have said it that way.

>
>
> ---------------------------------