Welcome to Norse World
Norse World is an interactive spatial-temporal resource for research on spatiality and worldviews in medieval literature from Sweden and Denmark.
About the Norse World project
Norse World is an interdisciplinary resource for research on worldviews and spatiality in medieval literature from Sweden and Denmark. The Norse World resource is a result of the Norse Perception of the World project, a three-year interdisciplinary infrastructure project (IN16-0093:1) funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2017–2020). Find out more about the project, the infrastructure including data visualisation, how to use Norse Word, and our terms of use. You can always contact the project team if you need any further details.
An ongoing project
Please be aware that the Norse Perception of the World project is still ongoing and that the Norse World resource is still being worked on and developed. This means that new data such as new attestations, texts, and sources, are continuously being entered into the database. For more information and updates on the amount of attestations in the database, texts or sources that have been added, or any current technical issues, please have a look in the News section. You can also follow us on Twitter.
The primary audience of the Norse World resource includes researchers on any level within academia (from students up) who work or are interested in working with spatiality and medieval literature from Sweden and Denmark, e.g. philologists, historians, onomasticians, linguists, literary scholars, and digital humanities scholars. The secondary audience is the general public, and any other parties that have an interest in the resource.
The Norse Perception of the World project sees East Norse, i.e. Old Swedish (incl. Old Gutnish) and Old Danish, literature as a mine of information on how foreign lands were visualised in the Middle Ages: What places were written about and where? Are some places more popular in certain text types or at certain times? How do place names link different texts? Is there a shared concept of spatiality? How is space gendered? Any research aiming to uncover what pre-modern Scandinavians understood about places abroad requires as a minimum an index of foreign place names and other location-based data in East Norse medieval fictional, non-biblical literature from before 1530, an infrastructure that has not existed until now.