The Terrifying Sound of Sea Monsters

Olaus Magnus's Carta Marina is the first derailed map of the Nordic countries to include place-name labels. The map also includes a number of fantastical sea creatures. Olaus Magnus described most of the sea monsters depicted on his map at length in his book 'A Description of the Northern Peoples'. Unfortunately Magnus never made any audio recordings of these monsters. We can therefore only imagine what terrifying sounds were made by these monstrous creatures.

This is exactly what I have done with my Sounds of Sea Monsters interactive map. Click on any of the sea monsters depicted on this interactive version of the Carta Marina and you can listen to an (imagined) recording of the monster's terrifying screams, growls and roars. You can also read the 'real' description of the monster that Olaus Magnus provided in his encyclopedic volume 'A Description of the Northern Peoples'. My map also includes some other interesting information provided by Magnus on the customs and lives of these Northern Peoples. 

Sounds of Sea Monsters was created using the Leaflet mapping platform. The map also wouldn't be possible without two wonderful Leaflet plug-in libraries - leaflet-IIIF and leaflet-hash. 

Museums and art galleries around the world are increasingly using the iiif format to display vintage maps as zoomable images. The leaflet-iiif plugin allows you to use these iiif manifests with the Leaflet mapping platform. This means that you can create a Leaflet map from any image which has a iiif manifest.

In order to add interactive elements to a iiif image displayed in a Leaflet map it is necessary to apply a coordinate system to the map. Leaflet-hash adds a latitude and longitude to the URL of a Leaflet map. It can therefore be used to grab the coordinates of any location on the map. I used the leaflet-hash plug-in order to create the clickable polygon shapes on my Sounds of Sea Monsters map.