The universities of Oxford, Cambridge, King's College London and Manchester are among the partners in a major academic project to create a definitive online database for studying Anglo-Saxon writers.

The "Fontes Anglo-Saxonici" project will build a Website holding all the work of Anglo-Saxon authors and all the sources that they might have used. These poems and chronicles, hand-written over a thousand years ago, are now to become part of the digital age.

The long-term project has been accumulating material for a number of years, but is now reaching its final stages with the setting up of the Internet site.

The database, which will be used by English literature and language academics, holds 16,500 records, relating to about 900 Anglo-Saxon texts.

Scholars studying a particular author will have access to all other relevant texts and all the sources that might have been used by the author, whether in Anglo-Saxon, Latin or other languages.