Spatial Reading: Digital Literary Maps of the Icelandic Outlaw Sagas

Mary Catherine Kinniburgh

doi:10.16995/dm.66

Abstract

Digital humanities scholarship contributes to current conversations on literature in many forms, especially in its recontextualizing of what it means to read. By integrating visual, spatial, and quantitative forms of knowledge alongside the practice of text-based hermeneutics, digital techniques expand the possibilities of interpreting texts, particularly with the emergence of widely available geospatial and data visualization tools. This article outlines and reflects on a methodology for producing geospatial and data visualizations of place names in the Icelandic outlaw sagas, and discusses how the results corroborate existing research and also facilitate critical methods of ‘reading’ these texts spatially. While articulating the saga-specific findings of the visualizations, this article also contextualizes the conceptual work of digital literary mapping as a method that is particularly insightful as we determine the role and validity of digital techniques, especially for interdisciplinary and historically-situated work.

Highlights

The Íslendingasögur, or Icelandic Sagas, were recorded in manuscript form from the late twelfth century to the early fourteenth century, and are thought to contain a mixture of oral tradition and literary styling
To examine the possibilities of greater engagement with small-scale and experimental digital maps, this article will use the digital literary mapping project Space and Place in the Icelandic Outlaw Sagas (Kinniburgh 2014), a geospatial and data visualization mapping project that depicts all place name locations in the Icelandic outlaw sagas according to their geospatial information and their narrative function
I will contextualize the methodologies I used in this project to generate geospatial and network visualizations of place names in the Icelandic outlaw sagas, and examine these visualizations alongside more traditional modes of saga analysis by scholars including Barraclough, Byock, and Kirsten Hastrup while situating my methods alongside other digital literary mapping work

Summary

Introduction

The Íslendingasögur, or Icelandic Sagas, were recorded in manuscript form from the late twelfth century to the early fourteenth century, and are thought to contain a mixture of oral tradition and literary styling. As Wrisley (2018) notes of his digital project, Visualizing Medieval Places, examining “where, when, and how often locations are mentioned in a literary-historical corpus” affords new means of depicting place names, with the rise of more widely-available geographic information systems (GIS) technologies (S145, S147).

Results

Conclusion