I wanted to talk a bit about the GIS project that I looked at for this week, which is called Sagngrunnur. This project began as a database of Icelandic folk legends in 1999 by Professor Terry Gunnell from the University of Iceland—who actually translated into English a lot of the Sagas that I have been reading for my course this semester— Bo Almqvist at University College Dublin (to whom the project is now dedicated following his death in 2014), and Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir from the Arnamangæan Institute (Denmark). The welcome page of the site notes that, “This new version of the database (from 2014) is the end result of an intensive re-structuring of the database which now includes geographical mapping of a large number of the place names in the database.” It should also be noted that the re-design and mapping was carried out my MA work done by Trausti Dagsson.
The welcome page also notes that the Icelandic fairytales used for the project are from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, which places outside my normal wheelhouse. I was hoping that the project would incorporate the Sagas, but I was happy to explore a different realm. Also, since I’m going to Iceland this May to help lead an undergraduate course on fairytales in Iceland, it really could not have worked out any better.
So, the basic layout of the site is a welcome page where you can “open map,” or choose an “advanced version,” or read more about the project. If you scroll down, you are able to see a simple map of Iceland with different colored circles dotted all across the surface. The circles are filled with numbers and vary between yellow to red based on how high the number is. On the right-hand side is located a filter where the user can select from Legends, Elves, Trolls, Ghosts, and the Devil. The points on indicate the number of instances the topic the user has selected occurs in various legends, and geo-locates those events on the map. If you click on the circle, it will zoom in and more points will appear, which, when clicked on, will tell the names of legends, their year of publication, their author, and a brief summary of keywords. This is just the basic version of the map.
For a more detailed inquiry, I went to the advanced version. Here you can select from multiple hundreds of keywords to search by and you can even compare more than one keyword. Some examples I chose were “farming practices” and “elven farming practices.” I compared the two and the map generated on the map instances of places in Iceland where fairytales mentioned farming practices of both humans and of elves. Users can also search for homes, places, legend names, and people. This is definitely a good tool to have if you have a particular search in mind. For me, however, I was simply playing around to get a sense of the website, and I think the amount of information is pretty overwhelming unless you know what you’re looking for. To help with that process, the project managers included a user guide in the nav bar, which was absolutely useful to me.
Of course, it should be said that the website is available in both Icelandic and in English. The biggest drawback, however is that most of the descriptions or summaries of fairytales—once you click on a point on the map, for example—are written in Icelandic. For someone like myself, who is just starting to learn Icelandic and can only pick up every fourth word, this can be a problem. But really, I shouldn’t complain given the robust database the project managers are working with. Also, Google Translate can often be helpful (shh, don’t tell my fellow language instructors that).
A more specific critique of the layout and the typography would yield that Sagngrunnur, while being basic in appearance, is aesthetically pleasing. I did not find any typographic crimes to speak of; the font was pleasant and professional. The color scheme was interesting without being distracting, and I think that’s what is most important, the scholars wanted the focus to be on the maps—as it should be. Also, the welcome page has a lovely picture of Iceland lit up by night in the header, and I would love to be able to do that with my site!
Finally, this site was very much a project done by academics and is probably intended for other scholars or academics, but I can certainly see given the ease of use and the instructions, that the site is also aimed at enthusiasts. I would 10/10 recommend.
Sagngrunnur can be found here
