Thesis Theater: Richard Rohlin

Thesis Theater Recording

Event Announcement

Join us on Tuesday, November 13, at 7 PM ET for a Thesis Theater with Signum MA graduate Richard Rohlin, who will discuss his recently completed thesis with thesis director Paul Peterson.

About the Presenter

Richard Rohlin is a husband, father of four, data analyst, and amateur philologist living in Grand Prairie, TX. He is currently in the final semester of pursuing his graduate degree in English Literature and Language from Signum University with a concentration in Germanic philology, producing a new critical edition and translation of the Old Norse poem Hervararkviða. A lover of ancient languages, he teaches a Latin class for adults out of his home, and is currently working on a translation of Vergil’s Aeneid. His essay “Masters of Fate: The Men of the Silmarillion” has been published in Forgotten Leaves: Essays from a Smial. He also co-authored “Do Elves Dream of Immortal Sheep?” in A Wilderness of Dragons, a forthcoming festschrift in honor of Verlyn Flieger. His other hobbies include traditional archery and bowyery, tabletop gaming, conlanging, poetry, and Medieval theology. He also blogs short philological notes at http://blogonthebarrowdowns.blogspot.com/.

Abstract

The Digital Hervararkviða: “To the Letter: Philology as a core component of Old Norse studies,” Svanhildur Óskarsdottir proposes that the editing of texts should be the core of Old Norse studies. She asserts that only when scholars “wear the cloak of the philologist” will we finally be able to connect the achievements of our nineteenth-century forbearers with the many branches of twenty-first century scholarship. The advent of the digital era has created unprecedented opportunities for scholars to engage directly with the manuscripts. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has created a standardized method for encoding digital editions of texts which can then be distributed digitally and used by students and teachers alike. Since they are encoded as XML, these texts can easily form the basis for the data-driven approaches to manuscripts currently in vogue within the digital humanities. The Medieval Nordic Text Archive (MENOTA) project has established standards specific to the encoding of medieval manuscripts written in the Nordic languages and maintains a catalog of texts which can be either downloaded or viewed online. This edition of the Old Norse poem Hervararkviða renders the H-version of the poem into a MENOTA standardized XML format containing all three “layers” of textual engagement supported by MENOTA: facsimile, diplomatic, and normalized Old Norse.