Sagas of Blood & Fire
An interactive map of Iceland's historical battles and violent conflicts.
The idea
Iceland's conflicts are thoroughly documented and poorly presented: long prose, no geography, and no easy way to see that two events happened in the same valley two centuries apart.
What I built
A map you move through rather than a page you scroll. Conflicts sit where they happened, a timeline runs underneath, and filters for era, type and confidence narrow it down. Detail opens only when you ask for it.
The interesting part
It is built for someone with five minutes, not a semester. That constraint, friendly and fast history for the impatient, decided the interface: the map answers ‘where and roughly when’ immediately, and everything else stays folded away. It is also honest about what is uncertain, which matters when half the sources are sagas.
Decisions
Confidence is part of the data
Each event is tagged high, medium or low confidence, and the map can be filtered by it. When a saga-era location is uncertain, the closest known modern place stands in as a placeholder and the location name says so.
The data drives the interface
The timeline range and the year sliders are derived from the events themselves, so adding an event never means editing a constant somewhere else.
Every event has an address
Selecting an event updates the URL hash, so any point on the map can be shared as a direct link. Markers and timeline events can be reached and opened with the keyboard.