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and reading. Visions of Digital Editions’, also presents the possibilities
opened up by digital editions of medieval manuscripts and the texts they
preserve, and he underlines the advantages and flexibility of hyperlinks as
part of such editions, noting that “the editor may also insert new links that
are not found in the original manuscript, but are needed for the modern
reader’s understanding. the material linked to can, for example, supply in-
formation about palaeography, historical linguistics, terminology, the criti-
cal status of the text, etc” as well as being used to give users access to texts,
knowledge, or even rituals referred to in a manuscript’s “original analogue
links”.70 the kind of non-sequential reading such a linking framework of-
fers is, it is suggested, akin to hypertexts as developed in modern computer
terminology and digital contexts.
this theoretical idea is not developed to a great degree as the focus of
Carlquist’s article is more on what digital editions might look like. over
ten years on, much of what Carlquist discusses has been implemented as
part of digital editions although a digital edition of a medieval Icelandic
manuscript that comprehensively utilises these possibilities has yet to be
released (multiple levels of transcribed texts, variant readings from other
manuscripts, full lemmatisation, hyperlinks to other media or material
etc). following on from the parallels drawn above between how medieval
Icelandic saga manuscripts were read by medieval and later Icelanders, and
how the same narrative material was also simultaneously read out of the
landscapes by the same people – that is, non-sequentially in terms of these
narratives’ chronology, and situated in the material context of the sagas’
landscapes – the hypertext idea can be taken a stage further. Pertinent
here, not least, are developments in media theory/new media theory, lit-
eracy studies and narratology that have taken place in the last decade in the
wake of developments in digital technology and its influence in virtually
all spheres of modern life.71
Marie-Laure ryan offers the following definition of a hypertextual
system:
“text is broken into fragments – “lexias,” for George Landow; “text-
rons,” for Espen aarseth – and stored in a network whose nodes
70 ‘Medieval Manuscripts, Hypertext and reading,’ 114.
71 See, e.g., ruth Page and Bronwen thomas, eds., New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in
the Digital Age (Lincoln and London: university of nebraska Press, 2011).