The Old Saxon Heliand

This is the Old Saxon Heliand. This text is based primarily on the Monacensis manuscript, and follows the recension of Otto Behaghel. See Taeger (1984) for a critical apparatus.

Taeger, Burkhard, ed. 1984. Heliand und Genesis. Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer.

Select the desired fitt, or pick one of the statistical synopses at the end of this list.

The following statistical synopses are ASCII files, many of them rather long. Significance refers to the question of whether the frequency is significantly different from the frequency that would be expected if the words co-occurred randomly.

The text contains 46283 tokens, 7724 word types, 123 punctuation types, 5983 lines.

Word-level bigrams: 40300 pair tokens in-line, 5982 across line boundaries. Average deviance (Observed - Expected) / Expected: within a line: 1.19988; across lines: -0.08511 (diff = -1.28499). Thus lines are relatively independent syntactic units, indicating a low degree of enjambment in the Heliand.

Statistical analyses:

Perl 4 source code of the programs that produced the statistics. Here is the Perl4 program that converted the Heliand text to HTML format.


Webster: Brett Kessler
email address
Last change 2002-11-06.