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Map of those places mentioned in the Orkney legends.
Sagnagrunnur began as a database of information relating to Icelandic folk legends in print which was started in 1999 by Professor Terry Gunnell, then lecturer in Folkloristics, who enlisted the invaluable help of his students. With the help of Trausti Dagsson, now working for the Arnamagnean Institute in Reykjavík, the Icelandic Sagnagrunnur has gone on to take the form of a geographically mapped database, returning the legends to the landscape that gave birth to them. The database has since been joined by another database on Icelandic wonder tales compiled by Professor Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, and even more recently has been connected to the database of sound recordings housed by the Arnamagnean Institute, Ísmús, extending the number of narratives covered in the database to over 25,000.
The Sagnagrunnur: Orkney database provides users with access to similar detailed information about both published legends and live recordings from Orkney (most of the latter coming from the Tobar an Dualchais/ Kist o Riches website (https://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk/) containing archival material collected in Orkney by the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. The database has been compiled by Amanda Green with help from Nicolai Lanz and Trausti Dagsson, and has been financed by research funding from the University of Iceland (Terry Gunnell) and the University of the Highlands and Islands (to whom we are especially grateful). This database follows up a similar database with materials from Shetland (https://sagnagrunnur.arnastofnun.is/shetland/), and work on a similar database of Faroese legends has been commenced.
As can be seen here, where possible, the legends are connected to their place of origin, the various entries containing summaries of the narratives in question, and details about where the whole story can be found (or heard), the collector, the storyteller, their gender, their place of residence, and those places mentioned in the account, as well as a list of key words (relating to a list compiled for the overall Sagnagrunnur project, but now also a number of additional words and concepts only relevant to Shetlandic and Orcadian folklore).When applicable, information is also provided about migratory legend types, allowing broader contextual comparison with stories found in neighbouring areas (which will come to include not only Iceland, Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes, but also the Faroes, Shetland and the Nordic countries (see also Sägenkartan: https://sagenkartan.isof.se/#/places/nordic/true; Samla: https://samla.no/viewer/index/ and the Danish Folklore Nexus: https://scando.ist.berkeley.edu/folklorenexus/). As can be seen from the user’s manual, users can easily widen their search to include other areas in the database, and use Google Translate to get basic translations of summaries in other languages.
Particular thanks are due to Tom Muir (of the Orkney Museum); Donna Heddle (of the University of the Highlands and Islands); Dr Neill Martin (of the School of Scottish Studies); and Lily Mellon (of the School of Scottish Studies Archives) for their help with this project. Additional thanks are due to the Archive of the School of Scottish Studies for allowing us to reference their on-line materials
The Sagnagrunnur: Orkney database is dedicated to Tom Muir for his lifelong work with researching (and telling) the folk legends of Orkney; to the memory of Walter Traill Dennison; and finally to the memory of Professor Bo Almqvist (1931-2013) of University College Dublin, who had a lasting love of the folk legends of the North Atlantic Islands, and dreamed the dream that gave birth to the Sagnagrunnur (see Terry Gunnell, “In Memoriam: Bo Almqvist [1931-2013]“, Folklore 125.2 [2014]), 258-261
