iceland imagined nature, culture, and storytelling in the north atlantic

[...]... 10õ introduction how this process evolved, identifies the actors in the process, and explains their interests in the transformation of the North Atlantic Geographical and Historical Outline of the North Atlantic From the early Middle Ages on, the North Atlantic can be best understood as the Viking-age settlers themselves probably saw it: as a series of landfalls, as a chain of islands bridging the Atlantic. .. it is the point of the inquiry in Iceland Imagined Mogensen points out one of the yardsticks: the division between heathen and Christian This was one of the most obvious European measures of a culture and also one of the most rigidin the early eighteenth century a line could simply be drawn with Norway, Iceland, the Faroes, the Shetlands, and Orkneys on one side and Greenland on the other Furthermore,... borders, at the points where differences can be seen most clearly.8 By looking at the edges of Europe in the North Atlantic, we can understand what it means to be European by identifying which aspects of life on these borders traveling Europeans found to be exotic, strange, and disconcerting Iceland Imagined examines how Iceland and the rest of the North Atlantic region, which includes Greenland, northern... display the Christian culture from the beginning it was an important point for Bruun that Iceland and the Faroes should be included because he thought that the traces of the Northern culture in Greenland could be better understood if the visitor could compare them in the same exhibit with the better-preserved houses and other material artifacts from Iceland and the Faroes The idea of visualizing cultural... classifying, imagining, and writing about Iceland and the North Atlantic region with surprise and wonder about its contradictions, paradoxes, and extremes. Their stories, the reactions of the natives to their stories, and the consequences of these narratives and counternarratives for the region, are the topic of this book At that moment in Iceland that first summer, however, the idea of Iceland as part... Atlantic from the European continent to North America, although of course the earliest settlers had no idea that North America was a continent They left Norway in the ninth centuryaccording to their own founding myth to escape the tyranny of a Norwegian kingand settled in the Shetlands, Orkneys, Faroes, and Iceland From Iceland, after a pause of about a century, they went on to settle in Greenland and explore... Borderlands With this history in mind, the map of the North Atlantic, as regarded from Europe, appears as a series of outposts charting the progressive landfalls of Scandinavian settlers from the mid-ninth century to the year 1000, a date that marks both the introduction of Christianity into Iceland and the Norse discovery of North America The territories of the North Atlantic were outposts in several... For all these reasons, Oslund argues, Iceland and the North Atlantic have served for the past two centuries as a landscape and region for meditating on a peripheral other that has stood as a defining counterpoint to everything that Europe and the rest of the modern world were ceasing to be Partly because they were becoming modern at the same moment that other Europeans were beginning to question the price... trained to be impressed by: cathedrals, castles, and monuments, structures that derive their historical authority through their age and their memory of the past In Iceland, a historical memory invoked by the built landscape seemed to be missing at first glance If the Icelandic cityscape seems modern, so too does the Icelandic soundscape Since the early 1990s, Iceland has been marketed by the tourist industry... kilometers from east Iceland, and Greenland is almost 300 kilometers from the west coast of Iceland The Faroe Islands, where some of the settlers remained, lies roughly at the midpoint between Norway and Iceland When the Norse settlers came, the North Atlantic islands were sparsely inhabited, if at all, and population density remained low in the centuries after Norse settlement The explanation for this . call them, ranged from Iceland, Greenland, and even Newfoundland in the west to England, France, Russia, and the Black Sea in the east, wreaking havoc wherever they went. In 793, they sacked the. Flora and Fauna in Iceland 61 3 | MASTERING THE WORLD’ S EDGES Technology, Tools, and Material Culture in the North Atlantic 82 4 | TRANSL ATIN G AND CONVERTING Language and Religion in Greenland. Iceland Imagined who have had a life-long fascination for this remote and eerily intriguing island in the North Atlantic. When my h-grade class back in the mid-1960s spent a semester doing