Storytelling at the Edge of Civilisation: Mapping, Contextualisation, and Analysis of Landscape-related Storytelling Traditions in the Icelandic Westfjords

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Egeler
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495416732

The project will use our last chance to contextualise and analyse traditions of storytelling in the northern part of the Icelandic Westfjords before the demographic collapse of the region leads to a loss of its rich heritage. The northern part of the Strandir district stands at the edge of civilisation both spatially and temporally. Spatially, being the northernmost inhabited part of the district, it today forms the outermost periphery of the settled land; and temporally, following decades of population decline and the closure of the last local school in 2018, its abandonment as a place of habitation has become foreseeable for the near future.For academic research this would mean the loss of essential contextual information that is crucial for the analysis of an outstandingly rich intangible cultural heritage. In this region, traditions of storytelling have been documented systematically since the mid-19th century. This has created nearly unique archival holdings. The narratives collected there, however, are so closely intertwined with local topography and land use that understanding them without contextual information about the land and its use often is impossible. In the existing material, however, such contexts are given only through reference to place-names that have never been mapped and that today are known only to locals who are at least in their 70s. Therefore, replicable analyses by people who are not locals to date are practically impossible. The project will lay the foundations for comprehensive, replicable analyses by documenting the disappearing place-name landscape, mapping its story places, recording relevant contexts and thus securing information that is indispensable for analysing the archival materials.The project will show the paradigmatic importance of these materials through exemplary analyses. After the locations of this storytelling culture have been documented, the density of the data will allow to develop new perspectives on current research discourses. Exemplary analyses will make new contributions to two discourses: (1) the Scandinavian Studies discourse on the reception of medieval saga literature in the 19th and 20th centuries; and (2) the theoretical discussions about the fundamental mechanisms of land-related storytelling in the context of ecocriticism.Implementing the project in a timely fashion will lead, in addition to a PhD thesis and a research monograph, to a digital database that will be created in collaboration with the Folklore Centre of the University of Iceland in Hólmavík and the LMU Center for Digital Humanities in Munich. This database supplements the existing archives and makes the contexts of the storytelling tradition under study permanently and openly accessible through a website and the deposition of the research data in a public research data repository. Thus, the approach developed by the project can also serve as a general model for the preservation of vanishing storytelling traditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Iceland
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Christian Riepl
• Cooperation Partners: Jón Jónsson; Ester Sigfúsdóttir