The call of the North

Abstract

Current scholarship on early musicology in Nordic countries has highlighted the wealth of source material held by local institutions, which has resulted in many online resources being made available. A number of the websites listed here present written sources from Nordic countries in a very wide (non-music-specific) context, as many digitization projects are not focused solely on music. The musical properties of the sources are often accommodated in the search functions, however, and browsing through the contents of these databases offers comprehensive insight into the material culture of written sources within each country. (My thanks to Árni Heimir Ingólfsson and Bjarke Moe for their helpful suggestions for Icelandic and Danish online resources.) The early introduction of the Reformation to Nordic countries in the first half of the 16th century resulted in some considerable changes in the handling of medieval liturgical sources. In particular, a notable proportion of medieval books survive as parchment fragments owing to royal bailiffs repurposing the discarded pre-Reformation liturgical books as bindings for their account books. Significant parts of the surviving parchment fragments are from liturgical music books since folio-sized missals, graduals and antiphonaries were possibly quite handy for harvesting big enough sheets of parchment to cover the bailiff’s notes written on paper. The following websites contain the largest collections of fragments in Nordic countries and available online, but many more are kept in various other libraries.