The research project “Stories for all time”, which ran from 2011 to 2014, had as its aim to survey the entire transmission history of the Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, a group of Icelandic sagas often referred to in English as “mythical-heroic” or “legendary” sagas. Although the sagas themselves are thought to date from the 13th or 14th century, they are preserved mostly in post-medieval paper manuscripts. We set out therefore to locate and catalogue all the manuscripts containing texts of the 35 sagas which make up the corpus. In the end we found over 1000 manuscripts – containing nearly 2000 texts – the earliest from the beginning of the 14th century, the latest from the beginning of the 20th. About a quarter of these were not previously known to scholarship. We catalogued all of these manuscripts using a very restrictive subset of the TEI manuscript description module, which allows us to compare codicological and other features of the manuscripts in a way hitherto impossible. The article presents the schema and some of the results of our analysis of the encoded data
