Image: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Extraordinary Old Frisian fragments found in in Austria
Two unusual Old Frisian fragments have been found in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. These include pages from a hitherto unknown version of the Old Frisian Wills of the Five Parts (Wilkarren fan de Fiif Dielen), which can be linguistically dated to the early 14th century. The find was announced by Austrian Prof. Dr. Robert Nedoma in the leading scholarly journal DIE SPRACHE. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft.
The manuscript fragments were long part of the private collection of Josef Bick (1880-1952), former director of the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, who acquired the pieces during his studies in Prague. It was not until 2022 that the collection was acquired by the National Library in Vienna and made available for research. Where the Old Frisian texts were originally written is not known (yet), but in any case they originate from the provinsje Fryslân.
Contents
The found 24 pages of an otherwise lost manuscript contain two Old Frisian text fragments in addition to Latin texts. The first fragment contains texts related to the fifteenth-century Jurisprudentia Frisica tradition, which is currently being investigated by a team of scholars at the Fryske Akademy (Prof. mr. Jan Hallebeek, Prof. mr. dr. Hylkje de Jong, Dr. Han Nijdam, Dr. Oebele Vries and Dr. Marvin Wiegand).
The second fragment is a partial version of the Old Frisian Willekeuren van de Vijf Delen (Wilkarren fan de Fiif Dielen). The language of this text belongs to the older language layers of Western Old Frisian that we have at our disposal, namely from the early 14th century.
Special
“It is very special,” said Dr. Han Nijdam, project leader of the Fryske Akademy's Aldfrysk research group. “Very little Old Frisian has survived, so such a substantial fragment of the Wilkarren fan de Fiif Dielen is a serious expansion of our knowledge. It is archaic Westerlauwish Old Frisian, and moreover, we find here learned law and classical native law in one manuscript.”
About the research group Aldfrysk
The research on Old Frisian (ca. 1050 to ca. 1550) is one of the flagships of the Fryske Akademy. Research on the Old Frisian language and Old Frisian law has been carried out for many years. This has led to numerous publications and databases, the most recent being an edition a translation of the oldest book in Frisian: Freeska Landriucht. The project “The Roots of Western Old Frisian”, launched in 2024, takes place in cooperation with the University of Amsterdam (Prof. Dr. Arjen Versloot). It involves interdisciplinary research into the oldest linguistic and textual layers of this corpus and will lead to numerous (digital) publications.