This online text of the Rigveda derives from the highly important Rig Veda: a Metrically Restored Text, by Barend A. van Nooten and Gary B. Holland, published in 1994 by Harvard University Press; van Nooten and Holland's edition, as the first attempt to present the poems in their entirety in the poetic form in which they were composed, constituted a watershed in Rigvedic scholarship, but it has been out of print for several years. The preface of the printed book states (p. i) that the content was "in part derived from an incomplete electronic version of the Rig Veda produced at the University of Texas in 1970." (N.B. The Linguistics Research Center produced a complete electronic version of the text; decades ago, a copy was donated to the Oxford Text Archive.) Re: editing in this new online electronic version, outlined below, or Rigvedic language issues in general, contact Karen Thomson.
The form in which the Rigveda was handed down by Indian tradition, the saṃhitā text, applied later rules of sound combination throughout that systematically destroyed the metrical form of the poems. These inappropriate combinations have to be resolved before the text can be read, and they frequently obscure meaning. For illustration of the many ways in which the later editorial process distorted and obscured the original, see section 45.1 of our online course on the language of the Rigveda, Ancient Sanskrit Online.
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Two electronic versions of the Rigveda were provided on the diskette. In addition to the metrically restored version (RV), which forms the basis for our online edition, the unrestored Aufrecht (RVA) text was also supplied. Included also were miscellaneous DOS applications -- variously dated 1986-1990 -- and some online (README) documentation.
Third, we faced the problem that no font then known to us (none was included on the diskette) could properly render the Rigveda text -- even if our own subsequent editing had not required the specification of yet more code points, not used by van Nooten and Holland. We decided that the only reasonable option was to convert the entire text to the Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) character set, for which many standard fonts are available.
Fifth, for publication online we selected the HTML web page format (using Unicode UTF-8) in the belief that this represents the simplest and most effective means of free, worldwide distribution. In this way, we could publish our results and simultaneously facilitate Rigveda research by others -- goals no doubt shared by van Nooten and Holland, now 14+ years ago.
The primary purpose of our online edition is to show the original linguistic and poetic style of the Rigveda, and to make the text accessible in this form and easy to read. In addition, as is to be expected of an innovative and highly complex piece of work, some errors remain in van Nooten and Holland's attempt. By putting the metrically restored text online we hope to facilitate its further improvement and correction by scholars; accordingly, scholars are invited to suggest further corrections using the "Send comments" e-mail link at the bottom of this or any other LRC web page, or by contacting Karen Thomson directly.
In other respects, however, their edition of the Rigveda is conservative, and would meet with the approval of its primary editor. Van Nooten and Holland have not imported most of the conjectural readings of modern scholarship, with the exception of the revision throughout of the incongruous form u loká to uloká, an emendation which is based on strictly linguistic arguments. So that the reader can assess these conjectural readings (the different reading can be found in the TITUS version of the Pada text), they are briefly discussed below.
The poems of the Rigveda were produced over a considerable period of time. Although critics remain divided in their view as to the historical relation of its different parts, there is general agreement with E. Vernon Arnold's identification of passages that he categorized as "popular," which he describes as later additions to the original collection. Many of these are found in Book 10, but every book contains at least some "popular" passages.
Our online edition of the text is the first to mark these passages, which we have divided into two categories. When Arnold's assignment of passages to the Popular Rigveda is based on linguistic evidence, the passages are distinguished by both color and smaller type size; but passages that Arnold classified as "popular" for non-linguistic reasons (position, meter, supposed subject matter, repetion in later collections) are distinguished by smaller type size alone. In addition, passages in which the linguistic evidence points to their "popular" nature, but which Arnold for the same non-linguistic reasons does not mark as "popular," are also identified by smaller type size in our text.
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