Swedish · Image to Text
Nordic hands from the sealed charter to the printed form
Swedish, Danish and Norwegian records were written in Latin, then in the vernacular, in Gothic charter hands, neo-Gothic cursive, Fraktur type and finally a Latin round hand that took a century and a half to win. Evidano reads each of those stages on its own terms, including the pages where two of them share a line.
Choose the hand or document type
Medieval Scandinavian Latin and Vernacular Chartersc. 1100–1500Transcribe Danish, Swedish and Norwegian charters in Gothic documentary hands: Latin suspensions, þ and ð, witness lists and dating clauses.
Danish Royal and Municipal Gothic Chancery Handsc. 1500–1700Transcribe Danish royal, town and court records in gotisk skrift: looped chancery cursive, Latin and German insertions, money signs and dates.
Swedish Neo-Gothic and Fraktur Administrative Handsc. 1500–1750Transcribe early modern Swedish: neo-Gothic chancery cursive, Fraktur print, variable å ä ö, terminal flourishes and Latin words in roman type.
Danish-Norwegian Parish, Court, and Administrative Gothicc. 1700–1875Transcribe kirkebøker, probate and court protocols and royal ordinances in Danish-Norwegian Gothic cursive, with farm names, ditto marks and old money.
Swedish and Norwegian Transitional Gothic-Latin Handsc. 1750–1900Transcribe Swedish and Norwegian records where Gothic cursive and Latin round hand share a page: registers, censuses, printed forms and Fraktur type.
Transcribing Swedish across the centuries
The oldest documents are Latin charters with Scandinavian names, sealed and dated by feast day, and the first vernacular books — the provincial laws of Sweden, the earliest Danish and Norwegian codices — written in a Gothic book hand that still uses thorn. From the sixteenth century royal chanceries in Copenhagen and Stockholm produce privileges, ordinances and letters in a neo-Gothic cursive whose capitals are drawn rather than written, while the first printed bibles fix the vernacular in Fraktur.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the age of the register. Parish books, probate protocols, court records, cadastres, household examination rolls and censuses cover almost the whole population, ruled into columns first by hand and then by the printer. They are written in the mature Gothic cursive of the twin kingdoms and of Sweden, with money in rigsdaler or in daler and skilling, farm names spelled by ear, and ditto marks doing the work of repetition — until Latin script takes over, first for names, then for everything.
Genealogists tracing a farm through probate records, demographers counting ages at death, editors of law codes and correspondence, and archives publishing millions of scanned register pages all need the same thing: a reading that keeps the columns straight, records the spelling as it stands and says plainly which script each passage is in.
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