If you live anywhere in the Nordics, you’re walking on top of thousands of years of history every single day. Most of it has no sign, no plaque, no pin on your maps app. Nothing.
So I built a map. Together with Åsmund Sollihøgda, with input from my brother Björn Emil Härtel Jensen. It’s called Fornland. From Old Norse: forn means ancient, land means land.
Over a million cultural heritage sites from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Burial mounds. Rune stones. Shipwrecks. Rock carvings. Folktales. Battlefields. Megaliths. UNESCO sites. And much more. All in one place.
The data has always existed in national databases, but scattered across different systems, formats and languages. Fornland brings it together in one interface in seven languages, enriched with images and sources from Wikipedia, Europeana and other open data.
I tested it on my own neighbourhood in Oslo. Bronze Age burial mounds behind my son’s kindergarten. A Viking chieftain found buried with his sword a few streets from where I live. A German barracks camp from the war, completely gone from the surface. All within a five-minute walk from my house.
Everything runs in the browser. No backend. No login. No data collection. Free.
None of this would exist without the work done over decades and centuries by the people and institutions that recorded, preserved and opened up this data. Fornland just aggregates and puts it on one map.
Very much an early and humble work in progress.
Go explore and connect with the land you live on.