Iceland, Greenland, Northern Norway, and the Faroe Islands lie on
the edges of Western Europe, in an area long portrayed by travelers
as remote and exotic--its nature harsh, its people reclusive. Since
the middle of the eighteenth century, however, this marginalized
region has gradually become part of modern Europe, a transformation
that is narrated in Karen Oslund's "Iceland Imagined."
This cultural and environmental history sweeps across the
dramatic North Atlantic landscape, exploring its unusual geography,
saga narratives, language, culture, and politics, and analyzing its
emergence as a distinctive and symbolic part of Europe. The
earliest visions of a wild frontier, filled with dangerous and
unpredictable inhabitants, eventually gave way to images of
beautiful, well-managed lands, inhabited by simple but virtuous
people living close to nature. This transformation was accomplished
by state-sponsored natural histories of Iceland which explained
that the monsters described in medieval and Renaissance travel
accounts did not really exist, and by artists who painted the
Icelandic landscapes to reflect their fertile and regulated
qualities. Literary scholars and linguists who came to Iceland and
Greenland in the nineteenth century related the stories and the
languages of the "wild North" to those of their home countries.
Karen Oslund is assistant professor of world history at Towson
University in Maryland.
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