Will þ and ð come through correctly?

Yes. Both are recognised as their own letters rather than variants of p, y or d, on manuscript vellum and on a modern printed sign alike, and the same applies to the acute-accented vowels á, é, í, ó, ú and ý.

Can it read a saga manuscript’s abbreviations?

It recognises suspension strokes, raised letters and the Tironian ⁊ as abbreviations rather than stray marks. You choose whether they are expanded silently, expanded with the supplied letters marked, or left as the scribe wrote them.

Will it modernise an old spelling to match today’s Icelandic?

Not unless you ask for it. Because Icelandic has changed so little, it is easy for a model to blur a genuine medieval or nineteenth-century spelling into the modern form; the default keeps the page’s own spelling so the date and hand remain visible.

Can it keep a saga folio’s two columns in the right order?

Yes, if the layout is described in the prompt. Reading the left column fully before the right, and marking rubrics and initials rather than folding them into the text, keeps the sense of the page intact.

Does it work on photographed signs as well as scans?

Yes. A photographed information plaque or shop sign is read the same way as a scanned page, allowing for the angle and lighting of the photograph, and a short sign with no separate published source is marked as such rather than left unmarked.

Icelandic

Icelandic read the way it has always been written

Icelandic has changed so little that a modern reader can still work through a fourteenth-century saga manuscript, and its everyday print still carries two letters, þ and ð, that the rest of Europe dropped centuries ago. Evidano reads both ends of that continuity, from the abbreviation-heavy vellum hand of the sagas to an ordinary newspaper page, without collapsing þ and ð into a p or a d.

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Sample pages

Two-column vellum page of the Flateyjarbók saga manuscript in dense Gothic minuscule, with red rubrics, a small miniature and three further coloured initials — Sample 1. Folio 76r of Flateyjarbók (GKS 1005 fol.), written and illuminated by the priests Jón Þórðarson and Magnús Þórhallsson between 1387 and 1394 and now held with the Árni Magnússon manuscripts in Reykjavík. The page carries the end of Hálfdanar þáttur svarta and the opening of Haralds þáttur hárfagra in a compact Gothic bookhand dense with suspension strokes, interrupted by a small miniature and three colour-washed initials.

Worn brown cardboard cover of a 1915 Icelandic play, GALDRA-LOFTUR LEIKRIT Í ÞREM ÞÁTTUM, with an old library shelfmark sticker over part of the title — Sample 2. The cover of Jóhann Sigurjónsson’s play Galdra-Loftur: leikrit í þrem þáttum (Reykjavík, 1915), photographed from a library-bound copy whose call-number sticker now covers part of the author’s name. Thorn appears twice in the subtitle alone, Leikrit í þrem þáttum, exactly as it still does in Icelandic print a century later.

Front page of the newspaper Ísafold for 19 August 1899, a bold masthead over four narrow columns of small roman type — Sample 3. The front page of Ísafold, XXVI. árg., nr. 57, Reykjavík, 19 August 1899, reporting a fishing-boundary dispute, Ósvífið landhelgisbrot, and the first crossing of the Langjökull ice cap. Four columns of small, tightly set roman type carry þ and ð throughout, því, það, Guðmundur, in exactly the letters Icelandic print still uses.

Weathered metal plaque on a cracked wall headed SELJAVALLALAUG, with a photograph of a man and seven lines of Icelandic text below, one line printed in red — Sample 4. An information plaque at Seljavallalaug, Iceland’s oldest surviving swimming pool, built in 1923 by the youth association Ungmennafélagið Eyfellingur, photographed at the site in 2008. Seven lines of Icelandic set out the pool’s history and rules; the red line, "ÖLL MEÐFERÐ ÁFENGIS VIÐ EÐA Í LAUGINNI ER STRANGLEGA BÖNNUÐ", carries five ð’s in ten words.

From vellum to newsprint, one language throughout

Iceland was settled from Norway and the British Isles in the ninth century, and the sagas describing that settlement were written down from the thirteenth century onward in a Gothic bookhand on vellum: rounded minuscule letters, heavy use of suspension strokes and superscript letters, and a Tironian ⁊ for og. Because Icelandic pronunciation and grammar have changed comparatively little since then, a modern Icelander can read Njáls saga or Egils saga in something close to the original spelling, an experience with no real equivalent in English or the other Nordic languages. The great vellum codices, among them Flateyjarbók and the Poetic Edda’s Codex Regius, were carried to Copenhagen for study in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, above all by the collector Árni Magnússon, and most were returned to Iceland during the twentieth century; they are now held together at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík.

Two of the manuscript hand’s letters never left the printed language. Þ (thorn) and ð (eth), both inherited from the same runic-Latin mixture that gave Old English its thorn and eth, still open and close ordinary Icelandic words today, the only place in the modern world where either survives in everyday print. Icelandic also keeps six vowels marked with an acute accent, á, é, í, ó, ú and ý, each a distinct vowel rather than a stressed one, plus ö; a model that treats the accent as decoration and strips it turns one word into another. Manuscript abbreviation thinned out only slowly: early printed books, from the 1540 New Testament to the 1584 Guðbrandsbiblía, still carried suspended endings and the ⁊, and it is really the eighteenth century before Icelandic print settles into the spelled-out alphabet used now.

Everyday Icelandic material for transcription is just as continuous. A nineteenth-century newspaper sets its news and advertisements in the same þ-and-ð alphabet a reader uses today; a hand-lettered information plaque on a farm building or a village pool carries a full paragraph of prose, capitals and all; and modern Icelandic cursive, taught to a distinct national model, still gives þ a descender and ð a crossed ascender that are easy for a generic model to misread as p, b or d.

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Þ, ð and the accented vowels

Þ and ð sit outside the Latin alphabet most models are tuned on, so þ is read as p or y and ð as d or o; the six acute-accented vowels fare little better, since á, é, í, ó, ú and ý mark distinct vowels rather than stress, and dropping the accent turns one word into a different one entirely.

A bookhand built on suspension

The saga hand marks a missing letter or syllable with a stroke above the line, a raised letter, or a shape borrowed from Latin scribal shorthand, and the same stroke can resolve differently depending on the word around it. Reading it means recognising the abbreviation system, not just decoding individual letterforms.

Two columns, dense and continuous

Saga pages are ruled into two tight columns with no paragraph breaks, chapter headings picked out only in a red rubric, and a coloured initial the only signal that a new section has begun. Column order and rubric placement have to be read correctly before a single word is transcribed, or lines from opposite columns end up stitched together.

A language readable across eight centuries

Because Icelandic has barely changed, a model can mistake a genuine medieval spelling for a typing error, or make the opposite mistake and silently modernise a saga’s own forms to match today’s dictionary. Either error erases exactly the evidence a philologist is trying to read.

Who works with this material

Saga editors and philologists

Scholarly editions of the sagas and eddic poems are built folio by folio from the vellum, distinguishing what the scribe wrote from what a later editor supplies. A transcription that keeps suspension marks, rubrics and folio breaks in place gives an editor a usable first pass rather than a normalised paraphrase.

Genealogists and local-history projects

Iceland’s patronymic naming and small population make parish registers, censuses and local newspapers unusually rich genealogical sources, but only if þ, ð and the accented vowels in a name are kept exact; Þórðardóttir and Thordardottir will not match in a search.

Museums and heritage groups

Small museums, swimming pools and farms across Iceland carry hand-lettered or printed information boards explaining their own history, often the only record of a detail nobody wrote down elsewhere. Digitising them usefully means transcribing the sign as it stands, not correcting its spelling or dropping its diacritics.

Newspaper and archive digitisation

Iceland’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century press ran for decades in the same dense, small-type column layout, and a project indexing it needs þ and ð recognised as themselves rather than folded into t, y, p or d, or a search for þingmaður will miss half of its own archive.

Getting the best transcription

Step 1

Say which letters must survive

List þ, ð and the six acute-accented vowels in the prompt and ask for them to be kept exactly as printed. That one step is what stops þing becoming ping and Þórunn becoming Thorunn.

Step 2

Set an abbreviation policy for manuscript pages

For saga vellum, decide whether suspended letters should be expanded silently, expanded with the supplied letters marked, or left as the scribe’s stroke. State it once and the same rule holds across a whole codex.

Step 3

Name the folio’s two columns

Ask for the left column to be transcribed in full before the right, and for rubrics and initials to be flagged rather than merged into the surrounding prose. Getting the reading order right the first time avoids sentences stitched together from opposite columns.

Step 4

Test on the most damaged item first

Before running a full batch of signs, newsprint or vellum, start with whichever item is faded, cracked or worn at the edges. If illegible stretches are marked rather than guessed there, the cleaner pages in the same batch need only a spot check.

Frequently asked questions

Will þ and ð come through correctly?: Yes. Both are recognised as their own letters rather than variants of p, y or d, on manuscript vellum and on a modern printed sign alike, and the same applies to the acute-accented vowels á, é, í, ó, ú and ý.
Can it read a saga manuscript’s abbreviations?: It recognises suspension strokes, raised letters and the Tironian ⁊ as abbreviations rather than stray marks. You choose whether they are expanded silently, expanded with the supplied letters marked, or left as the scribe wrote them.
Will it modernise an old spelling to match today’s Icelandic?: Not unless you ask for it. Because Icelandic has changed so little, it is easy for a model to blur a genuine medieval or nineteenth-century spelling into the modern form; the default keeps the page’s own spelling so the date and hand remain visible.
Can it keep a saga folio’s two columns in the right order?: Yes, if the layout is described in the prompt. Reading the left column fully before the right, and marking rubrics and initials rather than folding them into the text, keeps the sense of the page intact.
Does it work on photographed signs as well as scans?: Yes. A photographed information plaque or shop sign is read the same way as a scanned page, allowing for the angle and lighting of the photograph, and a short sign with no separate published source is marked as such rather than left unmarked.

Related scripts and pages

Norwegian Image to TextThe other Nordic written language covered here, descended from the same Old Norse but changed far more since.Swedish and Danish-Norwegian PalaeographyThe Latin and Gothic hands of the mainland Nordic kingdoms, contemporary with Iceland’s saga age but built on a different script tradition.Medieval Scandinavian Latin and Vernacular Charters, c. 1100–1500Charter hands from the same centuries as the great saga codices, in Latin and the mainland vernaculars.Image to TextSearch all supported languages, scripts and document types.

Transcribe your Icelandic documents

Upload a saga folio, a newspaper page or a photographed sign, and check the first page for þ, ð and the accented vowels before running the rest.

Icelandic read the way it has always been written

Sample pages

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

Evidano Transcription

From vellum to newsprint, one language throughout

Why ordinary OCR struggles here

Þ, ð and the accented vowels

A bookhand built on suspension

Two columns, dense and continuous

A language readable across eight centuries

Who works with this material

Saga editors and philologists

Genealogists and local-history projects

Museums and heritage groups

Newspaper and archive digitisation

Getting the best transcription

Say which letters must survive

Set an abbreviation policy for manuscript pages

Name the folio’s two columns

Test on the most damaged item first

Frequently asked questions

Related scripts and pages

Transcribe your Icelandic documents

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