The Vinland Sagas

For my very first digital humanities project, I created an interactive map of the voyages described in the Vinland Sagas. The Vinland Sagas are two medieval Iceland texts, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, that tell the story of Norse adventures to Greenland and North America. You can explore the map of the Vinland Sagas here.

For this project, I worked with three other students in my freshman seminar, Migration & Mobility in the Medieval North. We began the process by reading the texts, identifying the passages and characters that resonated with us, and marking the relevant locations. I worked primarily on Leif Erikson’s story and was responsible for writing descriptions of the places he visited, integrating textual evidence and images into our digital map. Together, we wrote a companion essay that placed the map in its historical context and provided background information to the general public.

By the conclusion of the project, we mapped over 40 different locations across the voyages of four characters from the Vinland Sagas. Through this process, I learned that technology can be a powerful tool to supplement and visualize traditional historical sources.