From Iceland to Jerusalem - An Annotated Web Edition of the Itinerary of Abbot Nikulás

Together with the Scandinavian Studies Department in Tübingen, a seminar on the Itinerary of Abbot Nikulás of Munkaþverá took place in the winter semester 2014/15. The aim of the event was to introduce the participating students to certain working methods from the so-called "Digital Humanities" using this rather short text, which is well-known in Old Norse Studies. The basic idea was an annotated web edition of the Itinerary, which is often referred to by the (Old) Icelandic title Leiðarvísir, in combination with an interactive map. For this purpose, the text was divided into small sections selected according to geographical aspects.

After brief introductions to the content of the itinerary and the reading of the manuscripts, the seminar was mainly devoted to project work. The students independently chose their thematic focus and their annotations. In addition, the participants, who had no palaeographic knowledge or any experience with Old Norse manuscripts, were free to transcribe a page from the manuscript.

Due to the considerable volume, the work could not be completed in one semester. In another course in the summer semester of 2015, all annotations were edited and saved together in an XML format. In addition, all places were listed in the plug-in Neatline of the content management system Omeka. The HTML files created by an automatic conversion were finally fed into Neatline.

Nikulás Bergsson (or Bergþórsson) was a widely travelled Icelandic scholar of the 12th century. He is considered to be the author of a number of skaldic poems and two texts that were first known to scholars as Landafræði because of their tradition. These are primarily the two geographical texts Leiðarvísir ('Guide') and Borgaskipan ('List of Towns').

Before he was ordained the first abbot of the monastery in Munkaþverá, founded in 1155, on 15 June 1158, he undertook a pilgrimage from Iceland via Rome to Jerusalem. His journey took him through Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and across the eastern Mediterranean to the Holy Land and Jerusalem. You can learn more about this journey with its most important stops in the already mentioned Leiðarvísir.

The style is extremely concise. The straightforward enumeration of places and distances in days is filled in with interesting facts about some places and historical and mythological anecdotes. One of the highlights is certainly the very extensive description of Rome, which far exceeds the description of Jerusalem, the actual destination. Taken as a whole, the text is a unique blend of concrete travel description and general erudition.

Manuscript

The text has survived in only two medieval manuscripts, both of which belong to the Arnamagnæan Collection and are in Copenhagen. It has survived in its entirety only in the encyclopaedic manuscript AM 194 8vo, which is dated 1387. There the itinerary is quite inconspicuously "hidden" without a heading or anything similar in a sequence of various geographical texts.

Also from this period is the two-sheet fragment AM 736 II 4to, which is, however, very faulty in the transmission of the continental European city names. In a sense, therefore, the text is only available in one manuscript. Both manuscripts are in such poor condition that the text is unreadable in places due to abrasion and other damage.