A map to the unearthly beings of Iceland

Professor Terry Gunnel is the man behind Sagnagrunnur

Professor Terry Gunnel is the man behind Sagnagrunnur Rax / Ragnar Axelsson

Exploring Icelandic folk tales, who told them, what they are about, and where they supposedly took place, has recently become very easy.

A project called Sagnagrunnur , dealing with all of these aspects, was recently turned into an interactive map. It is a geographically mapped database of nineteen of the main published collections of Icelandic folk tales, and contains information on roughly 10,100 legends. Users can browse through Icelandic folk tales and see how they spread over the country.

The stories themselves are in Icelandic, but the themes are in English , so the map can still be very interesting for non-Icelandic speakers.

An example of what you can find: there seem to have been more elf settlements in the North of Iceland than in the South-East, sea monsters were most common in the West Fjords, and outlaws were just about the only creatures to settle in the highlands – apart from some trolls.

There might be other things that come into play than where sea monsters and elves liked to reside, such as how active the collector in the area happened to be.

Each dot marks a placement of a tale, together they …

Each dot marks a placement of a tale, together they outline Iceland. Photo: Trausti Dagsson

A seventeen-year-old project

Work on Sagnagrunnur was begun in 1999 by Terry Gunnell, then lecturer (now a professor) in Folkloristics at the University of Iceland, inspired by the work of Swedish folklorist Bo Almqvist.

Gunnell was joined by students in a course on Icelandic legends and Rósa Þorsteinsdóttir at the Arnamagnean Institute in Iceland. The interactive map is the newest version of the database, carried out by Trausti Dagsson as a MA project in Public Folklore at the University of Iceland.

First major collector assisted by Jacob Grimm

The task of collecting of folktales in Iceland began chiefly with a man called Jón Árnason. He was inspired by the collections of the brothers Grimm in Germany, who played a large role in triggering the wave of interest in folk tales in Europe in the nineteenth century.

He was in fact assisted by the brothers, as numerous letters passed between Árnason and Jacob Grimm on the subject. The results was a collection called Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri , published in 1962-64 and which is to this day is the most extensive collection of folk tales ever published in Iceland.

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