GERMANIC PHILOLOGY

Ethnogenesis: It is about the process of formations of an ethnic group, this group shares some aspects like for
example the language, the ancestors, the religion or the place of origin. It is a concept defining having some common
traits within a specific group. This nucleuses of traditions are not fixed, they can change based on the fact that they
can change because they meet other people. For this reason when we consider Germanic migration we have to be
careful because from a cultural point of view a group which leaves the homeland and moves is not the same
anymore when it arrives and settles in another place.

Syncretism: means that it is an age where things are not really either one or the other, it was a combination between
pagan and Christian elements.

Christianisation: it was about to create educated people and making this pagan Christian people. Interpretation it’s a
very important concept in the middle age and it was very much used in a Christian context, in order to legitimate the
reading of certain texts they had to be interpreted in a certain way so that the people could read them without any
problem. So basically, behind every story there was a Christian truth to discover.

HISTORY OF TEXTUAL SCHOLARSHIP

A history of textual scholarship
Textual scholarship in the past was meant as a mere editorial praxis, it was about the examination of documents in
order to determine accurate and reliable texts. It led to a distinction between:

• Lower criticism: employed to determine reliable readings, philology was perceived as a form of lower criticism.
Reading is the lectio, so the portion of the text that differs in the tradition of that text (from one manuscript to
another one).

• Higher criticism: made the text subject to interpretation, that’s the case of literary studies and literary criticism.

Change of attitude
There has been a change of attitude in the last 100 years because textual scholarship intended as philology of course
has a critical component. This critical component is also present in the operations that might look very mechanical
(meaning non-critical), like the selection of a document or a facsimile edition.
Today textual scholarship is intended as a critical endeavour.

The facsimile edition (edizione anastatica) in the Greek culture was considered just a reproduction of the
manuscript, it is still considered an edition because there is an introduction so there is a critical endeavour, but the
critical texts is reproduced exactly as in the original one.

An edition is about making a text accessible, it is providing a text with additional scholarly value. Considering that if
you just put your facsimile online it is not an edition, but if you do so with also your annotation, a good manuscript
description or an introduction it can be considered as an edition. The discussion is still open among the scholars.

Greek origins
Textual criticism goes back to ancient Greece, in that time we can find some sort of philological attitude toward
critical texts.

First of all we can mention Peisistratos (560-527 BCE), he made the decision to have an official written text of Homer
regarded as the beginning of a sense of mistrust typical of textual criticism. Precisely in this sense of mistrust we can
see the essence of philology that is about being suspicious to what we have in front of us and to go back. Here he
idea was just to try to fix an official text and of course through a written text variance was not deleted, but simply
transferred to another medium, the written text.

Then we have Lycurgus of Athens (390-324 BCE), he did the same for the major Greek by placing a standard copy of
their works, but the same problem occurred because the preserved versions were not necessarily more authentic
than the others which circulated.

The attempt of this two was an attempt of fixing an authoritative text. Nowadays an authoritative copy is the
author’s fair copy, so the last copy before publishing (il testo che l’autore licenzia, nel senso che da alle stampe).
Turning point
With the creation of the Alexandrian library (284 BC) the librarian started to read the texts carefully and to find what
was considered inauthentic, so they started to reject readings. At first this rejection was connected to the
preconception of the one that was reading the text, was the text authorial or not authorial? In second place the
rejection was also about examining other texts that were similar, so different documents hat preserved the same
text. The idea was to find a text that was authentic by rejecting the readings that were not.

Librarians of Alexandria: platonic way to see the text

They started to compare text with each other and to prepare editions, the comparison of text is called collations (list
of variant readings) and they started to prepare editions. The idea was to try to see the text from a Platonic
perspective, it means that they did not choose any best texts and did not designate a copy as the most authentic.
They created ideal texts, because they had a more idealistic perspective on the text.

Platonism vs Materialism
Things became different when Plinius recounted of a cultural and trade war which happened between Pergamo and
Alexandria. The war was about the trade of the papyrus (the support used to prepare papyrus rolls) and there was a
prohibition to trade it, so pergamanians started to produce parchment. Also their approach towards textuality was
quite different from the one of the Alexandrians because for each surviving manuscript they carried out a full
analysis, they identified the philological features and studied the script, the paleography and the grammar in order
to choose the best text. They were more into a materialistic perspective on a text, it was something quite different
from what the Alexandrians did.

The history of textual criticism is a perpetual opposition between these two attitudes towards the text, a more
materialist approach to the text and a more idealistic one. We can find these kind of oppositions already in antiquity
that became the cores of discussion around the topic of textual criticism up until nowadays.

Digital scholarly editing is the way in which we can combine different approaches together, there is a plural
approach to textuality; it is not about choosing one option or the other because the digital paradigm allows us to
put more things together and provide different perspective on a text.

Materiality of book and their making up

During the V-VI century the cultural transformation from roll to codex has been completed. At the beginning the roll
had more prestige than the codex, this one was more popular among Christians, low social classes and it was hardly
used for the literary tradition. The roll was used for literature, had high social status and it was used by educated
people.

The first manuscript that we have from the Germanic tradition is from the Gothic culture, they are the oldest in the
Germanic world. They are translation of religious texts into gothic. An example is the Wulfila’s Bible and its surviving
manuscripts.

MILESTONES IN THE HISOTRY OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM

Materiality of texts and materiality of editions in the medieval Germanic traditions
What does it mean to focus on the material aspect of a text? What do we mean by materiality of a text and how can
we represent it in a scholarly edition? The more an edition becomes immaterial the more is likely that it can
represent the materiality of the texts.

We can say that books such as the Codex Argenteus established a tradition in the way of their representation, it
means that there are other books that are organized in a very similar way. For example there is a Codex Evangeliario
that has the same purple pages and gold and silver letters as the Codex Argenteus and the Codex Brixianus. That is
very important in the Germanic tradition.

We have many examples of palimpsests (manuscript rewritten where we can find a scriptio superior and a scriptio
inferior underneath, they have been scraped) in the gothic tradition because parchment was a really expensive
material and it took a lot of time to prepare it, so it better to scrape a manuscript and reuse it when it was possible.
Basically these manuscripts have different layers.
Il codice di Ursicino è un codice conservato nella biblioteca capitolare di Verona. La sua particolarità è che il suo
copiatore, il chierico della cattedrale Ursicino, ha inserito nel testo il proprio nome e la data del 1 agosto 517, un
fatto alquanto raro all'epoca. Ciò ha permesso di dimostrare che in quell'anno a Verona esisteva già
uno scriptorium (probabilmente esistente già da un secolo) conferendo così alla biblioteca il titolo di più antica
ancora oggi funzionante.

The Gotica Veronensia is a Latin manuscript that presents glosses in gothic, the document contains homilies. The
glosses have been scraped but we can today see them thanks to special lamps. The are connections between these
glosses and the Codex Argenteus. Probably there was a king of gothic cycle of which we do not have the original
manuscript, but all the legends were transmitted as glosses through the different traditions.

Is that so easy to detach the text from the rest of the manuscript? Here there are different school of thoughts and
we are going to delving into more material philology.

L’affinamento delle tecniche di restauro del testo, le esigenze critiche mutate, l’apporto di molte nuove discipline che
hanno posto il testo al centro del loro interesse rendono certe nostre edizioni, pur prestigiose, ormai inadeguate,
perché logorate dal tempo: di qui la necessità di ripensare, anche a livello teorico, a certi procedimenti di ricerca e di
analisi testuale per recuperare le tecniche metodiche ed editoriali più adatte a comprendere e far comprendere, oggi,
i nostri testi volgari nella loro complessità e totalità di rapporti e referenze, radicati saldamente nel tempo e nella
storia. A.M. Luiselli Fadda (2009), Quale «edizione - nel - tempo» (Contini) per i documenti e i testi germanici nel
ventunesimo secolo?

Back in 2009 a Germanic philologist started to question the way in which philologist prepared the edition. Luiselli
Fadda questioned editorial methods, she says that the editions that had been made so far were inadequate to
represent the historical dimension of the text and there are more adequate editorial ways to represent the
complexity of the vernacular traditions. Contini says that the edition is a work hypothesis and as that it can
undergoes changes and in order to grasp the real meaning of these texts, in order to be able to produce a new
edition, you have to really understand how they were conceived.

Textual criticism
This transmission of oral or written texts and the variation of these texts form the basis of an interdisciplinary
branch of scholarship called textual scholarship. Textual scholarship, or textual studies, is an umbrella term for
disciplines that deal with describing, transcribing, editing or annotating texts and physical documents.

Textual criticism is about to study the source, transcribing texts from the source and making these texts accessible by
means of scholarly editions (editions that met scholarly requirements). It is also about annotating texts but with
different methods for the digital editions.

Genealogical or stemmatic method

The father of textual criticism is Karl Lachman, even if he didn’t put into writing any handbook, so the work that a
philologist has to undergo but he prepared important editions of texts (Germanic texts and also texts from the
ancient world). The archetype a text very similar to the original one but it already contains an error shared by the
rest of the tradition. The big first operation that the philologist carries out is the recensio it is about collecting all the
witnesses of a certain text, to study this tradition by comparing the text between them, finding similarities and
differences, detect errors and asses their weight. The second part of this complex method is the constitutio textus, it
is about reconstructing a critical text. The point at the end was to reconstruct a text and to create a critical edition. Is
this edition to read? Not really. Also in the layout this edition is made in a particular way: the critical apparatus is
the place at the bottom of the critical text where the philologist puts the varia lectio, we also have the critical text on
the top which is a text as close as possible to the original one that has been lost and has to be reconstructed. This
method is about reconstructing a text that is as close as possible to the original one.

It is important to see how an edition was laid out because it has to became a book, the fact that all these variations
are put in the critical apparatus is because the product that we have to produce at the end is a book. Basically the
philologist is limited by the page paradigm.

Apparatus is just for multiple traditions, in the Germanic tradition we don’t have apparatus because in the majority
of the cases we have just one testimony of a manuscript or fragments of it in another one.
Bon Manuscript
Joseph Bedier was the first one that started to see the limits of the Lachman method. He was sceptical because he
noticed that some of the assumptions of Lachman could be easily contradicted. First of all he assumed that two
scribes cannot commit the same error, secondly he also assumed that a scribe worked by using one only model.
That’s not true because he didn’t take into account contamination, maybe a scribe in front of him had more copies
of one text and he decided to take one reading from a manuscript and the next from another one.

Also the concept of authority of a model was quiet different, the scribes were not always being there in order to
copy a text in a faithful way (the concept of being faithful to the original it’s a modern concept), we need to
remember that they were an active agent within the tradition of a text because they could decide to change the text
while copying it. The text is not a stable object within the vernacular tradition but it is fluid, the fluidity of the text
can be found also in manuscripts and not only in the digital editions.

Bedier proposes to edit a single manuscript. According to him what a philology should do is to edit a text with as few
corrections as possible: the bon manuscript. He was quite sceptical to edit a text loyal to the original form and he
preferred to publish the best manuscript, so a text that actually existed. The perspective is changing. The manuscript
tradition was studied also with this method but at the end the focus was still on the text.

New material Philology

Another important shift in philology took place thanks to Stephen Nichols. The focus was now on putting the text
back to where it belongs, so the manuscript. He didn’t invent anything, but he arrived to this conceptualization
thanks to the work of other scholars. First of all, we need to underline the fact that the variant is a fundamental
aspect in the manuscript culture and in the vernacular traditions. Variations are not errors to remove or to put in an
apparatus, but they are part of the history of the text and they have to be given account for. He was more focused
on the oral dimension and the oral performance of a text, a medieval text is not really read by a single one, but it’s
performed in front of an audience makes it became very fluid because every time you have a performance it is
unique, there is a sort of mouvance that characterises the medieval culture for the fact that is related to oral
culture. Nichols expresses a desire to go back to manuscript culture.

Philologist were only interested in the idealism of a text but not in what Nichols calls the manuscript matrix. Nichols
affirms that the manuscript first of all is the result of a collective work, a text written in a manuscript is a complex
editorial project that implies different contributions from many different agents: the poet, the scribe, the illustrator,
the illuminator and the commentator. These different agents have projected their attitudes on the parchment. The
manuscript contains several layers of representation, every layer can tell us something about the history, the
purpose, the circulation of a text and the social use of a text and these layers are a part of the manuscript matrix.

Key principles of new/material philology

• Literary works do not exist independently of their material embodiments, and the physical form of the text is an
integral part of its meaning. We need to look at the whole book, and the relationships between the text and layout,
illumination, rubrics and other paratextual features, and, not least, the surrounding texts. Codex and context.

• Manuscripts come into being through a series of processes in which a number of people are involved, at particular
times, in particular places and for particular purposes, all of which are socially, economically and intellectually
determined. These factors influence the form the text takes and are thus also part of its meaning.

• Manuscripts continue to exist through time and are disseminated and consumed in ways which are also socially,
economically and intellectually determined, and of which they bear traces.

Synoptic and eclectic edition

A synoptic edition it used when you have a large amount of sources and you want to deconstruct the text. It is
an edition which renders the text of two or more manuscripts in parallel columns across one or two pages, or above
each other, in horizontal rows. A synoptic edition can also render other sources than single manuscripts, for example
bringing together already existing editions. The main advantage of a synoptic edition is that it makes textual
comparison easy for the reader. If the textual variation within a manuscript tradition is high, it can overload the
critical apparatus, making a synoptic edition a viable alternative for the editor.
An eclectic edition is more adequate when you want to reconstruct the text, in giving out a critical text. It is
an edition based on more than one manuscript, so it won’t reflect a single manuscript, such as a documentary
edition does, but tries to approximate an earlier stage of the textual transmission by selecting readings from several
manuscripts. The eclectic edition will select the supposedly best readings wherever there are conflicting readings in
the manuscripts. It also includes the critical edition in the lachmanian sense.

Edition typologies
If we focus on the reproduction of the source we can have different levels:

 Facsimile
 Ultra-diplomatic
 Diplomatic
 Normalized

Another way is to consider the process of the making of the edition:

 Resultative: it is like a reading edition, there is no interest in seeing what lies behind the text but only in the
final result.
 With apparatus: it is about showing the variants within a text
 Genetic: more interest in the process then in the text that was published, it is shown the development of a
text.

We can see the different edition typologies also according to the selection of the documents:

 Documentary
 Best-manuscript
 Synoptic
 Eclectic

DIGITAL PHILOLOGY
From new philology to digital philology
As far as scholarly editions are concerned, the failure of the electronic edition ever really to take off is due to a large
extent, I have come to believe, to the inability of textual scholars to see, and embrace, the real potential of digital
media, as doing so would inevitably involve relinquishing the more-or-less total control textual scholars have tended
to want to maintain over the way in which their texts are presented. M. Driscoll, The words on the page: thoughts on
Philology, Old and New

Digital philology affirms that material philology failed to deliver adequate products. He suggests that scholars should
create editions of single manuscripts where maybe the text are also corrupted but they can be interesting from a
sociological point of view for example. That’s a way to put in practice the teaching of this new approach.
Another thing philologists could do is to edit instead an entire manuscript so you can really have an idea of the
complexity of the editorial project that lies behind the book.

Digital humanities
Digital humanities is about the intersection between humanities and informatics. In the scholarly community there
was a big change in the way in which they did things that called to rethink about all the methodological
assumptions. The father of digital humanities is Roberto Busa, he asked to the computer to perform some tasks in
order to study the language of Tommaso d’Aquino.

For some people the fact that computers arrived in the field of the humanities disciplines changed just the way in
which things were done. So computer are in the practice of these disciplines but the canon doesn’t change. Other
people say that the digital humanities is a discipline on its own, it means that it has specific methodological
questions and assumptions. The digital really created new subjects, such as computational linguistics or digital
history.

Digital scholarly editing

Digital scholarly editing is the complex process through which text-based primary sources are analysed, collated,
transcribed, encoded and disseminated to academic and public audiences in digital formats. It has developed
extensively from the 1990s to the present. Disseminating means publishing in the field of digital scholarly editing.
The concept of diversity is very important in the field of digital humanities.

It is not only about digitising something, there has to be another conceptual model behind the use of the digital.
Digital scholarly editing is a process, it is more about the process then the product. It means that, for example, when
you publish a book you send it to the publisher and it is finished there, fixed forever in that form. In the meanwhile
in the digital environment things can change, they can be incremented or they can expand, they can be revised, it is
a process in the sense that when you open a book you can only turn the pages but within the digital scholarly editing
you use something and you find your own way in digital resources. It is a process also for the users that use the
editions.

Scholarly digital editions (edizioni scientifiche digitali) are scholarly editions (that are scholarly enriched
representation of historic texts or documents) that are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method and
practice. Digital paradigm means that you have to exploit the possibilities given by the digital medium, it is not about
upload a text online. In order to understand if a digital edition is really digital when you print it you have to have a
loss of both content and functionality, if it doesn’t lose anything it means that it is not a digital edition but only a
digitised edition. The digital paradigm is about a method that changes and a theory that changes, the editorial
theory changes and a new approach to textuality is born through the practice of creating digital editions.

Computational philology is about using very advanced methods taken from computer science in order to perform
philological tasks, for example handwritten text recognition in which the software can read texts written on the
paper in these old writing systems. These kind of programmes use algorithm and machine learning.

Digital philology is creating resources that are in any case different then what we would create in the print world, it
is about creating truly digital editions even if not that advanced as in computational philology. It is a product created
by following a digital paradigm. Digitized philology is just about saving your file in a different way, so instead of
publishing it to the press you publish it online.

What changes? Process of digital scholarly editing

We have three main steps to bear in mind in the work digital philology:

1) Study of the source. The source is studied in a different way, of course you have to go to the library and see
the manuscript but you can find also manuscripts online. There are very advanced techniques of digitisation,
such as photography, and of digital restoration of the manuscripts. The way in which philologists study the
documents is different, it is more quantitative.
2) Text representation. The other thing that changes a lot within the field of textual philology the
representation of the source, in this case it means annotating or encoding a text. It is about adding scholarly
value and an interpretation to the transcription, in the digital world this is done by using a markup language
like Xml and Tei. You produce an encoded text.
3) Presentation. The representation of the text is about working with the edition, it is about visualizing the final
edition.

When you study the source you start to see what is relevant, what is important to represent and what can be
avoided. This process is called modelling, it is when you start to understand to extract things and to understand
what it is relevant based on the analysis of the source. In the end you will have a model for data representation. This
process is involved when you are studying the source. We can have a very good model of data representation using
Xml/Tei, it is where you develop an encoding model and once you have it you can apply this model to the
transcription and what you obtain is an encoded text. Once you have the encoded text you have to find out a way to
visualize the text, style sheets are used in order to present and visualize the encoded text to the audience.

DIGITAL SCHOLARLY EDITING: SOURCE ANALYSIS AND TEXT REPRESENTATION

In the digital edition text representation and the presentation must be separated. Edition is about making a text
accessible. We start to understand what should be relevant to focus on the edition, this process is called modelling
and allow us to choose the specific vocabulary that we will use to encode the text (is about choosing from a
standard a model to represent my data and this model allows me to encode).
Study of the source
Things change a lot when it come to the study of the source in the digital world, now we can study primary sources
online. For example a very useful database online for Germanic studies is Handschriftencensus, on this website you
can find digitalized manuscripts.

 International image interoperability framework

The images became interoperable. Sometimes as a philologist you have the problem that some folios are in a
library and other ones in another, with these sources it is possible to put them together and reconstruct the
text just by adding the link of the two libraries. It has become a standard for the digitalization of images
among institutions.
 Digital paleography on DigiPal
It’s a collective project for the study of paleography with digital methodologies. It is about studying the
ancient writings with digital methodologies. DigiPal is a website where a user can put identify all the
characters that are relevant on a digitalized manuscript and annotate them and then compare all the glyphs.
So you can study on a comparative way, these kind of research was impossible up to few years ago and it
allows you to make a research and catch the differences or similarities that a human eye would not be able
to make.
 Mufi (medieval Unicode font initiative)
You also have the possibilities to transcribe the document on a certain way. These website is about the
transcription of the sources, Mufi is a group of medievalists, font designers and computer scientists. They
realized that Unicode did not provide all the glyphs that are useful in order to transcribe from an old
manuscript and they started to think about creating a resource which could include all the glyphs that were
missing. Single scholars had to ask for the creation of single glyphs that were missing. In the moment in
which you create an online edition of a manuscript usually you want to create a transcription which is very
close to the document and one that is more readable for the audience. The first one is made using original
glyphs and you can find them on Mufi. Every glyph is endowed with a series of information useful for the
description of that characters. It gives medieval scholars to create transcription that are faithful to the
document.
 Menota archive
Inside this resource you can find editions of texts belonging to the Scandinavian tradition. They are very
granular in representing all the glyphs and characters that are inside the manuscripts. You can find three
level of transcription: in the fac-similar they use transcriptions that reproduced every glyph in the
manuscript. The other level that they use is the diplomatic one in which they solve the abbreviation. In the
normalized level you have capital letters, commas and so on, it is kind of a reading text so a text that can be
written.

When you study an ancient manuscript the first thing is to analyse the quire structure (fascicolo), it is the smallest
unit of a manuscript. More quires put together create the collation structure of a manuscript. You can see how the
manuscript was composed by studying the quire structure.

There are different formulas that you can use to describe the collation structure of a manuscript. The collation can
be represented with a regular description or also with a visual representation of the structure of the manuscript, in
this case the irregular lines stand for leaves that were lost. You can also represent the collation with numbers (there
are different traditions for that), first the quires are indicated and then the leaf so you can create a collation formula.
In the digital version the collation can be represented in another way, there is a tool online that can be used for this
aim and is called Viscoll. You put all the information regarding the quire and the folios and at the end the website
create a sort of diagram that is connected with the digital manuscript. Styles for collation representation:

 i, 1-9 (8), 10 (6), 11-20 (8), 21 (7), i

 I-III8 , IV10, V-IX8
 1-4 8 , 52 , 64-1 , 7-1010

Text representation
Text representation means encoding a text by using mark up languages and standards. We transcribe from a
primary source but we do not just produce a readable manuscript but an encoded text. Computers can only process
texts with characters, these character have to be represented by a system relating to the system computers can
interpret. We call this character encoding but simple character encoding does not say anything about:

 structure of a text
 semantics
 interpretation

That's why, in order to enrich a text with this kind of metainformation, we need to encode or markup it. How? We
can do that by inserting natural language expressions in the text with the same character encoding, but separated
from it by specific markers:

 these are called tags

 all the tags used to encode a text together constitute a markup language
 the act of applying a markup language to a text we call text encoding

Historically markup was used to add annotation/marks (special codes) within a text in order to make it appear in a
specific way (ex. boldface). Now it's any means of making explicit what is conjectural or implicit: so a way to make
the user understand how a text can be interpreted. It mirrors a certain interpretation of a text. We need to
remember that encoding means interpreting and so explicit does not mean objective.

The markup language is a set of markup conventions used together for encoding texts. Xml provides the syntax and
it tells how the markup is to be distinguished from a text, what markup is allowed and what markup is required. Tei
provides the semantics and tells what the markup means.

If there is an abbreviation I want to represent it and to represent also the original world (produce a readable output)
so that everyone can understand the text. In order to do that I have to choose a specific tag that is called choice,
inside choice I have two possibilities: the faithful representation represented with the tag am and the readable one
represented with the tag ex. If I encode the world in this way in the moment I want to visualize my edition I can
choose between different options of representation. The tags are very important because they describe the source,
you can describe any kind of phenomena that takes place in the text. Elements have to be embedded with each
other.

<msDesc> manuscript description it is an example of a tag. Text encoding is an act of interpretation. Slide con il titolo
answer. In texts encoding you are describing phenomena, adding tags means to interpret. Yoi can say is not entirely
objective because is the interpretation of a philologist so you must follow the rule of the good practice: if the
majority of philologist do it in a way then that is the one that must be followed.

The Tei vocabulary is based on a xml meta language. Xml is a metalanguage that you can use in order to create a
vocabulary, it provides the grammar while the Tei tells me what an element means. Tei is an ongoing vocabulary that
every time is provided with missing worlds. h

XML/TEI
The digital turn
In the early stages of a new technology, people tend to think that its purpose is merely to replace and improve on
something they already know. The promise of the new is thought to be quantitative: the new thing will do the old job
faster, more efficiently, and more cheaply; it will increase 'productivity'; and so forth. Tools, however, are perceptual
agents. A new tool is not just a bigger lever and more secure fulcrum, rather a new way of conceptualizing the
world, e.g. as something that can be levered.

McCarty published a very important book which is humanity computing. He theorized the concept of modelling
data. He explained that the tools of the digital humanity are not only tools that we use to speed up and improve our
work but there is something more. It is really that our perception and idea of text can change because we use these
specifics new tools, it is about the fact that this new practice creates new theories.

Why Xml?
Xml is a metalanguage on which Tei is based. We can say that Xml provides us with syntaxes (a series of rules that we
have to respect) then Tei is only concerned about what the markup means (what is the value of a specific tag and
when I have to use that). Xml was chosen because it provides a series of advantages in the moment in which we
encode a text using this metalanguage.

 It is flexible: self-describing & self-defining. For example the structure of the data is embedded with the
data, it wraps up data in metadata
 It’s a metalanguage. It is a language that is used to describe other languages.
 It is extensible, there is not a fixed set of tags but it is progressively updated in order to describe the text in a
very granular way.
 It distinguishes between syntactic correctness and validity. Syntactic correctness means that an xml file has
to respect grammatical rules provided by xml. A file can be perfects from a syntactic point of view (it
respects all the rules necessary for Xml) but it might be that from a Tei point of view it is wrong. This second
kind of correctness, related to Tei, is called validity.
 It concerned with the meaning of data and not with its representation. With Xml you can really describe a
text. It is describing textual phenomena, scribal phenomena, content issues and stylistic issues. Of course the
meaning of the specific text is given by Tei.

Xml has no pre-defined tags, it is up to us to create them and to assign them meanings, that’s why Tei provides a
common vocabulary in order to be shared and exchanged with other people.

Wysiwyg stands for What You See is What You Get and it is very limited what you can describe and store by using
software with this system. For example you can just search strings of characters with this method. Wysiwyg are
systems that narrow the gap between what you see on the screen and what you type at the keyboard reduce what
you can.

XML structures
XML does not provide any meaning: ex. <p></p> = what is that? page, paragraph, person?!?
XML is not concerned with the semantics of textual elements, because they are considered application dependent, it
is up to the creators of XML vocabularies to choose intellegible element names, this is the purpose of the TEI
Guidelines. Element names are indicative of their function, they are called Generic Identifiers (GI).

XML syntax rules

XML documents must have a root element, this is the parent of all other elements.
The XML prologue comes first, character encoding is specified (UTF-8 default).
All elements must have a closing tag. XML tags are case sensitive: <line> is not <Line>, so you should be consistent!
Elements must be properly nested: no overlapping admitted

A well-formed XML document (not a TEI compliant one) contains:

 a prologue stating XML version and character encoding

 root element, here
 each other child is contained in the root
 elements do not overlap
 start-tags and end-tags are correctly placed everywhere

Text encoding
When we encode a text we are interpreting it, that’s the reason why you usually have to attribute responsibility and
the degree of certainty. Tei was an initiative promoted and empowered by philologist and it is a vocabulary written
in Xml. It became a sort of standard also in order to understand each other editions. Tei is a consortium, so a group
of people and the mission is to create standards to describe texts in digital form. Tei has very huge guidelines, there
are some elements that are more relevant for philologists.

A TEI document represents/describes/expresses whatever its creator considers significant about a text: structure or
content. This is the scholarly activity, involving a conscious choice about what to represent in a document and how.
It's time consuming, it's difficult, it's a new vocabulary to learn, but it's worth doing that.

The encoded text is the edition

Encoding has to be considered an act of interpretation and it's difficult to outsource this activity for a philologist.
Only a scholar can do the encoding because each text has its specific features etc. The edition “lives” in the encoded
document and it’s perfect for long term preservation. Encoding is describing (representing), not visualizing
(presenting). How to publish/browse the edition? by means of specific software such as TEI Publisher, EVT (edition
visualization technology), etc.

Scholarly edition vs Scholarly digital edition

A scholarly edition is an information resource which offers a critical (= scholarly enriched) representation of primarily
historical documents or texts. It’s enriched with a scholarly value, it has to meet scholarly standards. This definition is
valid for any methods and it’s about making the sources accessible.

Scholarly digital editions are scholarly editions that are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method and
practice. Digital paradigm means that it’s about exploiting the digital medium with all the possibilities it offers. A
scholarly digital edition it’s whether if you can print it without the substantial loss of information.

The edition is a model:

 based on a selection of witnesses

 embodies the scientific perspective of the editor
 presents a text according to standardized editorial models
 presents a selection of textual facts

Few things to summarize

A digitized edition is not a digital edition, the conceptual structure is the decisive element, not the way in which the
information is stored. A digital edition cannot be printed without a significant loss of content and functionality,
digitization is not enough to turn a print edition into a digital edition.

We have a well-established model for print editions, which has evolved over a long time and which works very well,
given the limitations with which publication occurs (the same limitations, of course, that had initially led scholars to
experiment new solutions). Working on the electronic format, we are no longer limited to what can be contained in
rectangular pages to be bound together with a book.

The page paradigm is the editorial theory and practice based on the book format and on the limitation of print
culture (ex. text + apparatus). The digital paradigm is the digital edition practice based on the digital medium.

HILDEBRANDSLIED
Technical information
2° Ms. theol. 54 it’s a manuscript that was produced in Fulda, it’s a theological manuscript dated back to the 830. It’s
a parchment manuscript, among the leaves of the manuscript there is a text which is very important for the history
of Germanic traditions which is the song of Hildebrand or the so called Hildebrandslied.

The manuscript is not in really good conditions. The flyleaf (foglio di guardia) was usually a blank leaf because its
function was to protect the book which, in this case, was probably without a cover for a while, that’s the reason why
the page was exposed to different agents that ruined and worsened the status of condition of this manuscript.

The Fulda monastery was founded by Anglo-Saxon monks, who played a fundamental role in the history of the
conversion of Germanic people. In Fulda insular monks were active and they brought with them also their scribal
usage, so their writing. That’s why we can say that from a palaeographical point of view the text was written in
Carolingian minuscule (the official script of the Carolingian age which tried to unify the writing usage) but there are
still some Anglo-Saxon traits.

The first part of the text is contained at the beginning of the manuscript and the second part of the text is contained
at the end of the manuscript. The Hildebrandslied was copied on the flyleaves by two monks (two scribal hands),
because probably there was a scribe that had to learn how to write and another scribe that was more expert and
taught the younger scribe how to write. The poem is composed by 68 verses without an ending, it means that the
text is preserved in a fragmentary form (at the beginning and at the end of the manuscript) and also from a content
point of view we do not have any ending, but there are some hypothesis.

Why there is no ending? We do not know exactly but surely the scribe who wrote the text was not expert enough to
arrange the writing space in a god way so he arrived to the end and he didn’t have any space in order to put the
ending of the story. It is not unicum in this early stage of the written tradition of the Germanic culture to find these
kinds of texts written in the margins of codices.

There are also many mistakes inside the manuscripts, by looking at the errors scholars understood that the scribes
who copied did not copy the text because they had it in their minds but they copied from a model (another text) that
in philology is called antigraphy. They discover that because the errors present in the book are the one that people
usually make when they are copying from another written text. For example, they exchange letters or characters.

Contents of the story

The text is composed by long alliterative verses characterized by the alliteration, the typical verse of Germanic
tradition. The story is to locate during the great migration period, it talks about the duel between a father
(Hildebrand) and a son (Hadubrand). The two belongs to different armies, Hildebrand belongs to the army of
Theodoric the Great (he is the master of arms of Theodoric) and Hadubrand to the army of Odoacer who is
Theodoric’s enemy. The text reproposes an historical nucleus but in a legendary form.

Hildebrand and Hadubrand are not aware that hey are father and son. At a certain point Hildebrand understand that
but Hadubrand doesn’t believe him, he thinks that the one that is in front of him is a liar. Only in the Hildebrandslied
Theodoric is fighting against Odoacer, in the other manuscripts Theodoric fights against other enemies, so this text
here is significant because here we have the real historic facts in the sense that Odoacer and Theodoric were really
enemies and fought against each other.

Theodoric is at the court of Attila who is not directly mentioned in the manuscript but is called the lord of the Huns.
At a certain point Hadubrand looks at Hildebrand and he tells him that he looks like a Hun, meaning that he was
dressed in the way in which Huns dressed.

There is also a woman mentioned in the story, she is Hildebrand’s wife who doesn’t have a name in the story but is
just mentioned in the story as a bride. She is mentioned when Hadubrand recalls his own story, he says to
Hildebrand to his father left his homeland when he as a child, he keeps going on saying that his father left a wife and
a very little child at home and then he died. That’s the story that Hadubrand tells Hildebrand in the moment in which
Hildebrand tries to say that he his is own father.

This very private story leads to the typical way in which the legend about Theodoric the Great was told in this literary
texts, Theodoric was in exile at the court of Attila and there he remained for thirty years then he wanted to come
back to Italy and reconquer his own legitimate realm. The fact that Hadubrand and Hildebrand meet each other is
because Hildebrand is going back to Italy with Theodoric’s army, so we have these two armies that meet each other
on the way back and the two warriors star to talk. It is a very long dialog and at the end of it there are other four
lines in which the narrator tells us that the two start to fight because Hadubrand doesn’t believe that Hildebrand is
his father. The opposition in the story is between being faithful to the family or to the army. Hildebrand tries his best
to convince the son that it’s not worth fighting.

MEDIEVAL HEROIC EPIC

From the Germanic middle ages we have few different important epics coming to us:

 England: Beowulf (8th cent.)

 Scandinavia: Poetic Edda (13th)
  German speaking area: Hildebrandslied (9th cent.) and Nibelungenlied (1200)

Heroic epics revolve around the figure of a hero. There are different communalities around these stories such as:
archetypical heroes, adversaries, motifs, topoi, situations, landscapes. There is a purpose of edification in the heroic
epics, basically heroic legends and great men were recalled to have an influence on contemporary men, the purpose
of heroic poems are not to reconstruct historical events, but rather to tell the traditional story that has grown out
of historical events.

The hero, heroic poetry, and the heroic age

The focus of heroic poetry is on an extraordinary individual, the hero, who stands above his contemporaries in
physical and moral strength, that is common to all of heroic literature. Heroes are the products of narrative. The
study of heroic literature must be to some extent the study of the transformation of a historical human being into a
hero.

Scholars have observed the similarities in biography among heroes in many different literatures:

 Many heroes have a questionable or marvellous birth and youth. For example Siegfried’s birth is told in
several different ways in different sources and most versions include his youth as an apprentice smith in the
forest where he eventually kills a dragon.
 The heroic behaviour can lead to disaster as well as success.
 Much heroic narrative is tragic in its tone and outcome.
 They are men of great courage who know that they are fated to die.
 Heroes can only be overcome by overwhelming forces, and their deaths often inspire their respective
peoples to vengeance and victory.

Germanic heroic traditions

Heroes are a product of narrative, not of deeds and events so we need the story to have heroes. Many can have
performed heroic deeds but they become heroes only if their stories are told in heroic form. The Nibelung and
Dietrich legends are the product of a long process of transmission: they recall part of historical events of the 4-6th
centuries and then they became literary works of the 13-15th centuries.

Parts of the stories are based on recognizable historical events and other parts cannot be identified with any
recorded events or personalities. The Nibelung and Dietrich legends form the most important complex that was
known down through the Middle Ages throughout the parts of Europe in which Germanic languages were and are
spoken.

The most important thing to remember when talking about heroic epics is that starting from history and becoming
literary works, part of these stories are invented and in other we can find real historical events.

The heroic legends

These stories are characterised by displacement and synchronisation, it means that very often we find characters in
different places and next to unexpected figures that do not exactly belong to that period. For example, Dietrich
appears in the legend as a guest of Attila, who certainly died (453) at about the time the Gothic King Theoderic was
born (c. 451). Hagen, the killer of Siegfried at Gunther’s court, is next to Dietrich in the legends, while the historical
Gundaharius (and his brothers) died in 436, more than a decade before Theoderic’s birth. Theoderic’s historical
opponent Odoacer is replaced in virtually all medieval versions by Ermanaric, who died in 375.

Formation and transmission of heroic legends

It is also interesting to see how these heroic legends developed in the course of history. There is a sort of
development in the formation of a legend and we are dealing with at least three levels of story formation here:

1. Eyewitness reports of the historical events. We start from historical events that actually took place that at
first were narrated by eyewitness reports.
2. Oral heroic poetry based on the historical events. Starting from these eyewitness reports we can identify an
oral transmission of the same events that has a sort of a literary dimension.
3. Written literary adaptations of the oral heroic poetry. At a certain point these oral transmissions were
written down.
1. Eyewitness reports of the historical events
As soon as the events took place there were reports circulating among the communities, these reports and the
historically based oral poetry make up what we will be calling oral tradition. We know from modern examples how
unreliable eyewitness reports can be, but they are the most direct source of information about historical events. The
non-poetic reports were still subject to the distortions characteristic of oral narrative, so that they are no more
reliable as sources of “history” than the “literary” songs. Historical writing from the Middle Ages used oral tradition
as a source along with the written histories available to them.

2. Oral epic poetry

Sometimes reports quickly found their way into oral poems, they were heroic narratives that idealized the events
and their participants. The period of oral transmission is the most important part of the history of heroic legends, up
to 1050-1100 the stories were transmitted in the alliterative verse-form justified by the fact that the stories had to
be performed in front of an audience and alliteration was a way to remember the story, it was a way to keep the
memory alive.

These tales have the double function of keeping the deeds of past warriors alive and providing exemplary behaviour
for the living warriors. We need to understand the degree stability of the text because each performance was not
much a repetition of past performances as it was a recreation. Moreover oral poems existed in a tension between
tradition and the needs of living composition. In the end the combination of formulaic language and type-scenes
allowed singers to produce narratives of considerable breadth without memorizing them word for word.

To sum up already written literature in the middle ages was subject from a lot of variations. On the one side there is
the need to preserve tradition through oral poetry and on the other the need to create a good performance in front
of an audience. There is a lot of improvisation, the performance was a moment in which a text was recreated.

3. Medieval literature
Medieval written literature starts from the artistic formation of the oral legends to end into the works of medieval
literature we know, although all these works represent a reception of an oral tradition, they also represent the more
or less effective efforts of a literary artists that reshaped ancient stories. This is very much visible in the saga of
Theodoric the great, the compiler arranged his materials in such a way as to produce a monkish world history in
which a heroic paradise is destroyed by the desire for women

Historical sources
Historical sources refers to documents that were understood by their authors to be histories, the writing of history
consisted then as now of collecting information about the past. Ancient and medieval historians often considered
oral tradition to be a reliable source for information including not only narrative reports but also poetically formed
material.

1. Jordanes, Getica (551)

In the case of the history of the Goths we have to rely Jordanes Getica already in it we find elements of a legendary
recount but still we can consider it the most important source on the history of Goths. A Goth at the court in
Constantinople wrote his own history of the Goths based on Cassiodorus’s work, which he claimed to have had in his
possession for only three days. Cassiodorus was a high official in the government of Theoderic the Great, his history
of the Goths would presumably have been a great treasure of Germanic history if it had survived. J's Getica is an
unreliable text but it is, however, the only source we have for many events in Gothic history.

2. Gregory, Dialogues (592/4)

One of these retells an incident that had been passed over several generations, the original narrator had been an
official who had been sent with others to Sicily to collect taxes. On the island Lipari they were told that King
Theoderic was dead, a hermit told what he had seen the day before: “yesterday at the ninth hour he was led here
without belt or shoes and with bound hands between Pope John and the patrician Symmachus and thrown into the
crater of the volcano nearby.” The travellers noted the date and discovered that it was precisely the death-day of the
king.

The story narrated in Gregory’s Dialogues is a very popular story, it has been narrated and re-narrated throughout
history.
3. Chronicle of Fredegar
It’s a 7th-century Frankish chronicle that was probably written in Burgundy, it’s the major source for the so-called
Gesta Theoderici, there is evidence of an early development of the legendary history of Theoderic. Fredegar's version
contains also the germ of the exile of Theoderic because of Odoacer, in fact during the battles against him Theoderic
has to flee. His mother appears to him and and calls on his courage by saying that there is no escape, eventually
Theoderic kills Odoacer.

The event of the exile of Theodoric is an invention that can be spotted in this chronicle. The role of the mother of
Theodoric is important because during the middle ages there is the idea that Theodoric is not only to be saw as a
valuable warrior but sometimes also in the shoes of a coward king.

4. Quedlinburg annals (11th cent.)

Another source for history are the so called Quedliburg annals, Quedlinburg is a small city in Saxony-Anhalt and the
story survive only in a 16th century copy. It is difficult to understand what is original and what was invented, in fact
not only is it difficult to isolate genuine 11th century material from later interpolations, but the original text itself
represents a compilation from many sources. Despite that is valuable for our purposes because they form the
earliest surviving chronicle to show extensive influence from the oral tradition that led to the vernacular literary
works of the 13th century.

These annals bring Attila, Theoderic, Ermanaric, and even Odoacer together into one generation, clearly reflecting
the chronology of legend. Attila is given an extremely long life so that all events take place within his lifetime. When
we are told that Theoderic was the Dietrich of Bern, about whom the rustici once sang that is often thought to be a
late interpolation under the influence of a 15th cent. Chronicle. A secondary problem is the appearance of both
Odoacer and Ermanaric in the same narrative (usually one substitutes the other). Ermanaric has not yet clearly
occupied the position of Dietrich’s nemesis and he is shown as a cruel ruler in the brief references to the killing of his
son and to the hanging of his nephews. He is also responsible for the expulsion of Dietrich from his lands in a
sentence in which Odoacer appears as the evil advisor

5. Frutolf von Michelsberg

Frutolf is a priest at the monastery of Michelsberg in Bamberg (died in 1103), his chronicle was widely read and
copied in the later Middle Ages, it draws on texts available to him (including some form of the Quedlinburg Annals),
early histories (Jordanes, Gregory), and heroic legend, presumably received directly from oral tradition.

He was disturbed by the problems of chronology and he realized that Ermanaric, Attila, and Theoderic could not
possibly have been contemporaries and suggested that it was possible that other men bearing the same name as the
historical figures could have lived at the time of Attila. Frutolf is also responsible for introducing the story of
Theoderic’s end related by Gregory the Great into medieval German chronicle tradition

6. Other medieval historical sources

Cologne Kings' chronicle (Chronica regia Coloniensis, 12th cent.) reports the appearance of a giant phantom on a
black horse along the banks of the Moselle, the panthom identitied himself with Dietrich of Bern and warned of
calamities that would be visited on the Empire. The apparition is reported to have taken place in 1197 (some months
before the death of the emperor Henry VI – caused years of unrest in the empire).

Many later chronicles tell some version of the story of Dietrich’s being tossed into a volcano and most seem
concerned to emphasize that he will never return. The repeated emphasis on this point suggests that there was a
widespread belief that Dietrich would return at a time of great need, also the appearance of the phantom in the
Cologne Chronicle is related to this belief. The version of the Dietrich’s end we find in the Thidrekssaga leads
naturally to his association with the Wild Hunt, in which Dietrich is carried away on the back of a mysterious black
horse. This legend is widespread in Europe, and different historical and mythical figures are reported as the leader of
the nocturnal hunt, in late medieval sources Dietrich is repeatedly mentioned as its leader.

The saga
It is problematic to define a saga and its limits. There is a problematic tension between narrated events and the real
meaning that the poet assigns to those events; sagas were understandable only by the ones who shared the same
culture, values, society and that could identify himself in those events.
They are prose composition of variable extension written by anonymous writers. Sagas bloomed in Iceland (a bit also
in Norway) and became a very successful and genre between 13th and 14th century. The word saga does not
distinguish a written from an oral composition and it does not distinguish between history and fiction. In fact
truthful is important but not exclusive.

Sagas use a plain language and apparently far from rhetoric formalism and an immediate narrative technique. The
focus is on the protagonist who is described through his actions more than psychological narration, sometimes the
narration focuses also on other elements making up the background of the narration, such as ancestors, an old
event, genealogies. There is just a series of events important for the development of the story. Sagas are a mirror of
medieval Scandinavian society, they are a direct contact with society, ideals, conventions in which they lived and
died.

Sagas functioned as narration and preservation of cultural memory, the narration of events and characters was
motivated by entertainment. That's why inside a saga we can find poetic fragments in skaldic style: sagas are vehicles
of skaldic poetry.

Are sagas in debt with oral tradition? Are they the product of a new literary culture? Some claimed that sagas were
transmitted in oral form in an elaborated way through generations of poets and recorded in the written form only in
the final part of the oral culture. Other scholars claim that sagas are from the beginning written products, according
to which they are the result of local literary culture and corresponding conventions. Other scholars have a so-called
continentalistic view of sagas, they locate the literary prose in the context of a Christian and Latin culture.

Style
There was an attempt of classification of these sagas in different subgenres:

 Islendiga sögur: based on historical events which are considered important, like the migration, Icelandic
political and social life, journeys and adventures of specific figures
 Konunga sögur: based on historical events related to the history of kings
 Fornalda sögur: times before the colonization
 Postula sögur, Heilagra sögur: apostles' and saints' life
 Riddara sögur: epic-chivalric themes which are common to the late Medieval Europe

It’s a very heterogenous world, sometimes we find inside the same saga a lot of hybridization, it means that it has
characteristic of various subgenres.

THIDREKSSAGA
Theodoric saga of Bern
It was compiled around 1250, maybe earlier. We have three main witnesses od the direct tradition.

 Mb: parchment codex now preserved in Stockholm, it’s characterised by the fact that the beginning and the
end of the story are missing.
 A and B that are now in Copenhagen, they help us filling the gaps of the other manuscript.

The precise nature of the saga's immediate sources and its mode of composition are debated, the prologue
mentions the advantage of having lengthy oral stories in written form and the saga's derivation from German
sources including lays. The saga writer may have collected and combined in written form various unlinked stories or
poems transmitted orally, for some scholars it is also possible that the writer did little more than translating an
existing written low German version of the already integrated legends together with additional oral transmitted
material.

The main character of the saga is addressed as Theodoric of Bern, Bern is Verona. Bern become the toponomy
related to Theodoric because he fought an important battle in Verona and he did a lot in architectural and urbanistic
terms in Verona. Verona as a toponym related to Theodoric already since XI century in the Annales
Quedlinburgenses.

The manuscripts
The most important manuscript is Mb which stands for codex membranaceus. It lacks the beginning and the end,
there are also internal gaps. This lacks can be filled by two Icelandic paper manuscripts which are A end B. From the
comparison with A and B scholars found out that Mb lacks folios containing the first 21 chapters and the prologue,
even though some scholars consider it a later addition produced in Iceland. After chap. 428 there is an abrupt
interruption in Mb, so the end chapters are missing. In 1448 Mb came to Sweden, and the saga was translated into
Swedish, possibly at Vadstena monastery (Bridget of Sweden).

Manuscript A is a paper manuscript from the 17th century and is the copy of another codex that was destroyed
during the Copenhagen fire in the 18th century.

Mb, hands end text

Mb, it should be considered the result of a collective work by various hands, scholars within the manuscript have
identified five different hands (Mb1, Mb2, Mb3, Mb4, Mb5) that contributed to the writing. Mb2 and Mb3 have not
only copied the text, but also added parts of various extensions within the other sections copied by the other scribes,
so the text is the result of an editorial operation carried out by Mb2 and Mb3.

Scholars also realised that these two hands in order to provide the text with these additions the two scribes used
two distinct antigraphs, that’s why in this codex we find some inconsistencies because these two scribes didn’t pay
attention to the work of the other scribes. Traces of this imperfect fusion are to find in the repetition of some
episodes within the saga and on some inconsistencies within the plot.

Sources
Sources are to trace back to Germany. From the prologue we know that the sources are to trace back to Germany,
the saga was put together according to tales by German men. The saga is very long, full of different stories and
intertwining narrations.

We do not know exactly how these sources were put together. We need to face two different theories:

 The compilation theory refers to the fact that a poet compiled the story in the middle of the 13th century on
the grounds of legend and tales that were told by German merchants that were passing through Bergen at
that time.
 The translation theory was created because other scholars thought that the saga was not really an original
creative act but it was more a translation of a lost low German source.

Bergen could be the possible place of redaction due to intense commercial relation with other places of the
Hanseatic league and for the fact that there German merchants came and told their repertoire of stories.

The plot
The story begins with Theodoric’s ancestors. Thidrek's grandfather Sir Samson abducts the daughter of his lord and
kills both his lord and his king then he becomes king of Salerno. Samson passes his kingdom to his older son
Erminrek. Samson's last conquest of Bern (Verona) is passed to the younger Thetmar, who passes it to his son
Thidrek who establishes himself through adventures as a proper hero, Hildibrand is his weapon-master and
surrogate father.

It is a saga that really tries to establish Theodoric as a hero through the adventures that he performs throughout the
story. Also Hildebrand is very important in the saga. One third of the saga is devoted to the youthful adventures of a
series of heroes, they all enjoy Thidrek in a kind of Round Table. Then there is the story of Sigurd, Sigurd fights
against Theoderic, who defeats him. Thidrek and his men are recognized as the greatest warriors of the world.

Women have a particular function within the story. The stories are not only meant to entertain but they have a
function related to the later development of the story.

There is turning point in the saga and is the event that causes the exile of Theodoric. Erminrek's advisor Sifka takes
revenge of the fact that his wife was raped by Erminrek: he destroys everything dear to the king. Erminrek sends
Theoderic and his warriors to exile after Sifka convinced Erminrek that Theoderic did not pay tribute to him.

In the final third of the saga Thidrek is at Attila's court, during the first part Theodoric helps Attila in many battles
then he sets out to retake his kingdom, but because Attila's sons and his brother die he returns to Attila without
taking his lands.
Here we have also the story of the killing of Sigurd making up the Saga of the Niflungs and essentially is the same
story as it is narrated in the last third of the Nibelungenlied.

In the end Thidrek and Hildibrand return to Italy to recover their kingdom, with the help of Hildibrand's son Alibrand,
they defeat Sifka and retake his holdings and Erminrek's ones. After the death of his wife Herrad, Thidrek kills a
dragon. Thidrek is carried off by a mysterious black horse presumably to Hell, but the narrator suggests that he had
been able to call on the Virgin to save his soul. So in the hand it suggests that he is saved by a Cristian god. The fact
that he evokes a Cristian god it means that the writers wanted to show that he was converted to the real faith.

The structure
The story of the king of Verona is told, from his youth to the mysterious disappearance, through a narrative structure
that is evidence of the existence of a composition plan. Despite the numerous interludes concerning characters
unrelated to Theodoric, it is in fact possible to grasp the traces of a program aimed at constructing a peculiar
portrait of a hero.

For a long time the saga has been seen as a rich and precious repertoire of stories lacking a unifying structural
system, then scholars have identified some organizing principles that determine a specific thematic structure shaped
on the crucial phases of human existence: Theodoric's and his champion's youth, marriage and death.

Women as destroyers of the heroic world

The solar dynamism of the first part of the saga is gradually substituted by the grim advance of violence and death.

The turning point that we mentioned before is not just a turning point in the plot but also in the general
development of the story because up to that moment a sort of lost heroic paradise was narrated but then it was
substituted by a violent and cruel world. The saga is characterised by a sort of decline that is introduced when
women are introduced within the story.

Scholars have seen that as a sort of world history, the story of Theodoric is not only the story of a hero but it is also
the story of the Fall of Man. The original sin of Adam was portrayed as the result of his carnal desire for Eve and her
seduction and her ability to make him disobey God's command; similarly, the fall of the Age of heroes is portrayed as
a resulting from the carnal desire of these men for women.

The problem of genre classification

The saga is defined as a saga of the ancient times. From one hand this is true because it bares some of the typical
traits of the ancient sagas but it can be also classified with the fornaldasögur or with the riddarasögur. It is a sort of
hybrid product because it bares some traits of the one and some of the other even though it has little in common
with either genre, it’s almost unique of its sort.

It can be considered a fornaldasögur for these reasons:

 set in a remote past

 fantastic creatures (dragons, dwarfs, giants)
 heroic deeds and world • magical and supernatural elements

Some of these features are present in the Theodoric Saga but they are limited and rare are also the references to
pre-christian beliefs and customs.

It can be considered a riddarasögur because courtly influence is visible in style, lexikon, and content. There are also
reference to rituals that are typical of the courtly society.

Some stories are inserted within the main narration, what results is a very complex and articulated narration with a
core plot and main other secondary stories.

The poet
We know nothing about the author but we can drive a deal of information about him from the saga:

 He had great interest for Germanic antiquities

 He was competent in history so that he could locate the stories about Dietrich in their historical context
  He seems well-read in clerical traditions and oral heroic songs and stories about this hero, in fact he was
able to absorb a large number of stories and recast these stories in a Norse manner
 He was omnivorous in his search for materials and he included figures from other stories from
 He was familiar with vernacular literature in different languages
 No reason to doubt of what he claims: "to have learnt these stories by German men", presumably merchants
or other travellers

The prologue
There is a debate about the status of the prologue within the saga, it appears only in the Icelandic tradition (A and B)
but we do not know if the prologue is original or the invention of a compiler. There is lot of debate but not a
conclusive hypothesis on whether the prologue:

1. had to be also in the main manuscript / born in the context of the Norwegian court
2. it is an Icelandic addition
3. it derives from a German original

The topics of the prologue are:

 The reasons for its composition, the fact that old stories need to be written down
 The main characters of the saga are mentioned: Thidrek, Sigurd, Niflungar, Vilkinamenn, but also the fact
that despite there are many kings and warriors, the work revolves around Thidrek
 List of reigns and lands in which the plot moves from the south, that is southern Italy to the North and Spain.

It offers a rational explanation for those aspects that are far from reality. The roots of the extraordinary deeds
narrated are to date back to an era before the universal Flood in which men were similar to giants, post-Flood
generation lived under a progressive decline, lost its strength except for few heroes like Thidrek and his champions.
Basically the poet invokes a sort of geographic relativism to prevent objections: what is considered extraordinary in
a place, can be considered ordinary in another place. The message is that extraordinary events are related in any
case to the almighty God, for this reason they have to be considered true.