Matthew James Driscoll

I am senior lecturer in Old Norse philology (norrøn filologi) at the Arnamagnæan Institute (Den Arnamagnæanske Samling), a section of Nordisk Forskningsinstitut, a research institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. I have, since September 2004, also functioned as head of section and curator of the Arnamagnæan manuscript collection. From October 2011 to April 2012 I was Professeur invité at Université de Caen Basse-Normandie.

My research interests include manuscript and textual studies, particularly in the area of Old and Early-Modern Icelandic. But where traditional textual criticism sought to establish on the basis of the surviving manuscripts of a given work the text closest to the original — even in cases where the question of there ever having been an original could be said to be doubtful, or irrelevant — I prefer to see each manuscript not as a flawed representation of a putative Urtext but rather as a text in its own right, just as worthy of study as any other. I believe furthermore that no text can be dissociated from its physical embodiment, and that one must therefore always look at the whole book — including features such as format, layout, script, decoration and binding, as well as the surrounding texts — and the material processes through which it was produced and consumed, processes involving potentially large numbers of people over long periods of time. By shifting focus from the origins of literary works to their materiality — their existence as artefacts, shaped and reshaped by human hands — I believe we can achieve a better understanding of the structure and mechanisms of the production, dissemination and reception of not just of the chirographically transmitted Icelandic material with which I have chiefly worked, but of texts of any kind, from any place or period.

My current research projects include a book-length study of Magnús Jónsson í Tjaldanesi (1835-1922), an ordinary farmer with no formal education in whose hand are preserved copies, generally more than one, of nearly two hundred sagas, some dozen of which are not found elsewhere. The majority of these sagas are collected under the general title Fornmannasögur Norðurlanda (Sagas of the ancient men of the northern lands), thirty-two volumes of which, each of exactly 800 pages, are preserved, written between the years 1874 and 1916. A further ten manuscripts in Magnús's hand contain similar material, but without the title or date of writing; these are likely to predate the dated volumes. Many of Magnús's manuscripts contain prefaces in which he typically discusses his exemplar, how he had got hold of it, by whom, when and where it had been written, and the nature of the text, frequently in relation to other copies he has seen. Although Magnús can only have got the idea of prefacing his texts in this way from printed books, the prefaces depict a world at a considerable remove from the world of print and provide a wealth of information on the scribal network in late nineteenth-century Iceland.

Another major project is Stories for all time: The Icelandic Fornaldarsagas, a three-year research project funded by the Velux Foundation the aim of which is to survey the entire transmission history of the Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda and produce new digital editions of some of the principal manuscripts in which they are preserved.

Other research projects and networks in which I am currently involved are:

• Prentsmiðja fólksins: Handrita- og bókmenning síðari alda (The People's Press: Manuscript culture in the age of print), a three-year research project (2012-2014) with funding from RANNÍS the aim of which is to explore and exploit the wealth of handwritten sources in pre-modern Iceland (ca. 1530-1930); I am principal investigator.
• Reading and writing from below: Toward a new social history of literacy in the Nordic sphere during the long nineteenth century, a three-year project (2011-2014) with funding from NOS-HS; I am a member of the steering committee and will, over the next three years, spend six months conducting research in Iceland in connexion with the project.
• Medioevo Europeo — Medieval Cultures and Technological Resources, a four-year project (2011-2014) with funding from COST; I am a member of the steering committee and chair of work-package 2, Manuscripts and textual tradition.
• NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities), a four-year research networking programme (2011-2015) funded by the European Science Foundation; I am a member of the steering committee and chair of the working group on digital scholarly editions.
• COMSt (Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies), a five-year project (2009-2014) with funding from the European Science Foundation; I am co-leader of Team 3, Digital approaches to manuscript studies, and also contribute to the work of Team 2, Philology: Critical text editing, and Team 4, Cataloguing.
• Dansk editionshistorie, a three-year project (2011-2014) with funding from the Velux Foundation; I contribute several chapters to vol. II, Udgaver af vestnordisk og dansk middelalderlitteratur.

I have, in addition, a long-standing involvement in the work of the Text Encoding Initiative. I served on the TEI Council from 2001 until 2010, during which time I acted as chair of the Task Force on Manuscript Description (2003-5), whose job was the definition of a module for the description of text-bearing artefacts, and of the Personography working group (2006-7), which was charged with defining special purpose elements for the markup of biographical and prosopographical data. The work of both these groups has been integrated into the latest version of the TEI Guidelines, TEI P5.

Academic qualifications:

I hold degrees from the University of Stirling (BA (Hons.) 1979), Háskóli Íslands (Cand.mag. 1988) and Oxford University (D.Phil. 1994).

Publications:

My publications include articles on various aspects of pre-modern Icelandic literature, editions and translations of a number of medieval and post-medieval Icelandic works, as well as the monograph The unwashed children of Eve: The production, dissemination and reception of popular literature in post-Reformation Iceland (London, 1997).

Some recent and forthcoming publications:

• The long and winding road: Manuscript culture in post-medieval Iceland, Writing from below: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Nordic literacy in the long 19th century, ed. Anna Kuismin & M. J. Driscoll (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2012 [forthcoming]).
• Um gildi gamalla bóka: Magnús Jónsson í Tjaldanesi und das Ende der isländischen Handschriftenkultur, Text — Reihe — Transmission: Unfestigkeit als Phänomen skandinavischer Erzählprosa 1500-1800, Beiträge zur Nordischen Philologie, XLII (Tübingen, Basel: Francke, 2012), pp. 255-82.
• Handrit.is and the virtual reunification of the Arnamagnæan manuscript collection, Virtual visits to lost libraries: Reconstruction of and access to dispersed collections, CERL Papers XI (London, 2011), pp. 87-93.
• Arthurian ballads, rímur, chapbooks and folktales, The Arthur of the Northmen: The Arthurian legend in the Norse and Rus' realms, ed. Marianne Kalinke, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 168-95.
• The words on the page: Thoughts on philology, old and new, Creating the medieval saga: Versions, variability, and editorial interpretations of Old Norse saga literature, ed. Judy Quinn & Emily Lethbridge (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2010), pp. 85-102.

For a complete list, including links to those available on-line, click here.

Conferences and workshops:

I get around a fair bit, and have given lectures and organised or participated in workshops and summer schools in some 25 countries, principally in Europe, but also places further afield, such as North America, Australia, Russia and Japan. The lectures and conference papers have generally been on topics relating to Icelandic manuscripts, while the workshops have mostly dealt with various aspects of text encoding.

Some recent and forthcoming appearances:

• 27 April 2012, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Séminaire: L'emprunt dans les sagas; paper: The matière de Bretagne in late- and post-medieval Icelandic romances
• 29 March 2012, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Séminaire: Encodage de documents et de collections; paper: The handrit project (with Örn Hrafnkelsson).
• 17 February 2012, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Séminaire: La valeur des sagas comme documents historiques; paper: What's truth got to do with it? The Icelandic school of saga studies.
• 3 February 2012, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Séminaire: Autour de la collection arnamagnéenne : expériences dans les domaines de la conservation, de la valorisation et de l´exploitation du patrimoine écrit; paper: The Arnamagnæan manuscript collection.
• 27 January 2012, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Séminaire: Exploration et exploitation des sources encodées en TEI; paper (with Eric Haswell and Silvia Hufnagel): Quantitative codicology.
• 20 January 2012, Université de Bretagne occidentale, Brest, Séminaire: Histoires des Bretagnes : les conservateurs de la mémoire; paper: La matière arthurienne dans quelques sagas islandaises postmédiévales peu connues.
• 8-9 December 2011, National Helenic Research Foundation, Athens, COMSt Team 2 Workshop: Specific issues in Oriental philology; paper: Old and new philology.
• 17-18 November 2011, University of Copenhagen, Supporting Digital Humanities 2011; paper (with Eric Haswell): XML for quantitative codicology.
• 28 October 2011, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Séminaire: Les manuscrits post-Gutenberg; paper: Manuscript culture in post-Reformation Iceland.
• 21 October 2011, Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Séminaire: TEI et encodage des sources; paper: Using the Choice and Gaiji mechanisms to produce multi-level representations of primary sources.
• 15-16 September, Narodna Biblioteka Srbije, Beograd, EMBARK Workshop; paper: The TEI Gaiji module: Representing non-standard characters and glyphs.
• 20-21 May 2011, University of Copenhagen, Interdisciplinary Symposium on Literature and Identity Formation; paper: ± Icelandic: Defining Íslenzk menning.
• 12-15 May 2011, 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo; paper: Stories for all time: A research project on the Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda.
• 2-3 May 2011, Vilniaus Universitetas; lectures on Old Norse-Icelandic subjects.

I am co-organiser, with Ragnheiður Mósesdóttir, of the conference The care and conservation of manuscripts, held every 18 months here in Copenhagen (next from the 17th to the 19th of October 2012), and, with Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, of The Arnamagnæan summer school in manuscript studies, held alternately in Copenhagen and Reykjavík (this year in Copenhagen from the 15th to the 23rd of August).

Other interests:

Since the late 70s I have dabbled in photography, mostly land- and cityscapes, as well as things of the peeling paint school (it has always seemed to me that, in the right light, there are few things more beautiful than corrugated iron). Some of my favourites from the first 25 years or so can be seen here, while my most recent photos, including holiday snaps and suchlike, can be found on Picasa.

Apart from that, and drinking wine, I have no hobbies worthy of mention. I do, however, have enthusiasms; these currently include, but are not limited to, music by contemporary composers such as Arvo Pärt, Pēteris Vasks, Sofia Gubaidulina and Giya Kancheli, and pretty much anything to do with the Balkans, especially Bulgaria.

I am married (to Ragnheiður) and have two children (Kári and Katrín) and a beagle (Harry).