Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic (review)

Karen Oslund’s recent book provides a fascinating account of the development of the concept of “the European North,” that is, the image of the most northerly regions of the Atlantic littoral that formed in the minds of Europeans, mostly educated members of the upper classes with a keen interest in science and culture, and how this image changed from the 17th century up to the 20th. What makes this book particularly valuable is the breadth of context it creates by viewing “the North” as a whole, taking in all the lands of the northwestern margins of Europe—Iceland, Greenland, northern Norway and the Faeroe Islands. Common to these lands was a portrayal by a succession of European travelers as being remote and even exotic, their appeal deriving from their harsh physical conditions, inhospitable social environment, long history and unusual cultural context, set within a technological and material culture that was seen as simple and in many ways primitive.

Oslund presents a wealth of material, much of it already familiar to Icelandic historians and other specialists in these areas. But by broadening her focus—by viewing all the lands of the North Atlantic together—she is able, convincingly, to demonstrate failings in the approach of well-known regional historians, notably in their tendency to overlook the perspectives that foreign travelers and writers or representatives of the administration in the various countries can bring to our understanding of conditions in these regions and how they changed over time.

After establishing her subject within the context of international scholarly debate, for example on “the other European peripheries,” chiefly in Eastern Europe, Oslund turns to the question of what it was about these northern regions that attracted the interest of outside parties, why it was that places such as Iceland suddenly became popular destinations in the minds of aristocratic and educated foreign travelers. She points out, rightly, that “travelers often see what they expect to see, and any surprises they encounter along the way are reconstructed into the discourse set up by their outlook and goals for the journey, at least by the time they come to write the narrative” (21). In other words, their opinions and attitudes toward “the exotic” are to a large extent formed at home, before even they set out on their journey. She stresses the need for historians to study in depth at “what the author [of a travel book] expects to find on the journey” (21) and to consider how what such travelers actually see on their journeys compares with what they have brought with them from home. This, indeed, is the central theme of Oslund’s study, to explore “the sense of confusion and difficulty that travelers had in locating, measuring, and understanding this territory” (22). Moving on from this, she examines how Europeans (“the core”) treated the North Atlantic as a kind of outpost of the civilized world and how they and their attitudes were received in the lands in question (“the peripheries”). She then considers how both the core and the peripheries influenced the ways in which the regions were conceived in the minds of those who talked about them and finally how an integration of these perspectives gradually came about. What perhaps is lacking here, however, is an adequate appreciation of the influence of local perspectives in these processes.

A part of the interest in the North Atlantic regions among the educated European upper classes had its origins in Enlightenment notions of the relationship between man and the natural world, and specifically how nature might, if better understood, be regulated in various ways to ensure mankind a better and more secure existence. Oslund cites several remarkable examples of such measures instituted by the Danish authorities or Crown in Iceland. Experiments of this kind were intended to provide the authorities with a better understanding of how nature and society might work together in the country and...