Islands in the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination by Matthias Egeler (review)

The history of an idea is a difficult thing to capture. Concepts can shift and be reworked as they are handed down through generations and across cultures. It is problematic to clearly identify whether an idea has been borrowed, deliberately transmitted, appropriated, or is simply the result of some form of parallel evolution. A more recent, and exhaustive, history of a particular construct—the fabled ‘Islands in the West’—can be found in Matthias Egeler’s monograph, which charts the ‘entanglement’ of different legends of a transmarine paradise across Irish, Norse, Mediterranean, and Near East examples. It is not so much a search for origins but an attempt to catalogue the similarities and differences in each version, without ascribing cultural meaning, motive, or purpose.

It is an approach that seems to have a great deal of promise at the start of Islands of the West. The text goes backwards in time, first analysing the more recent (i.e. early and high medieval) examples of paradisiacal islands, before exploring examples further back in the historical record. Chapter 1, ‘North-Western Europe: Scandinavia, Ireland and the Land of the Living’, is a thorough exploration of Irish and Norse cycles such as The Voyage of Bran and the Book of Settlements, as well as other less prominent myths that depict a realm that is variously described as a ‘Land of Women’, ‘Wine-Land’, ‘Land of the White-Men’, and so on. It focuses particularly on how each depiction uses tropes of gender, power (including fertility and land), and immortality in different ways. The problems with considering the Christian context of the transfer of these pagan tropes to written format is noted, as well as how ideas of monastic isolation may have shaped a Hiberno-Norse desire for a distant idealized realm.

What comes across in the first chapter is perhaps the issue of grouping all these different transmarine realms as a productive form of analysis. Egeler almost overwhelms the reader with the sheer depth and breadth of the material studied, so that it is difficult to take a step back and adopt a critical look. This essential difficulty with cross-cultural analysis—making a definitive judgement—is compounded by the problems of evidence that Islands of the West explores in its subsequent chapters. Chapter 2, ‘The Classical Mediterranean: Rome, Greece and the Islands of the Blessed’, is probably the least convincing of the chapters. In part this is because Egeler starts to use evidence from Etruscan funerary images, combined with allegorical depictions of the Roman and Greek afterlife. The lack of detailed understanding of Etruscan rites and language makes the parallels Egeler is attempting to establish—a clear, overarching Mediterranean association between the afterlife and a sea voyage for deceased souls—stretched at best, and a lot seems to depend on whether Etruscan depictions of sea creatures on funerary displays are a core motif or a flourish, or exactly whether the Garden of the Hesperides counts as transmarine and is therefore a useful part of the analysis.

Chapter 3 is brief and largely consists of examining and refuting existing theories that seek to connect the Irish and Norse concepts of ‘Islands in the West’ right back to biblical and Mesopotamian understandings of the Flood, with their depictions of a flood hero who is translocated to a distant land, and associations with some form of powerful fruit (the apple of the Garden of Eden, for example). Egeler rightly observes that making this link requires a total inversion in the various mythic tropes, with the Near East mythos typically involving some kind of submerged world and temptation by women. This is at odds with the Greek and Roman sources that are posited as mediators between a Near East origin and an Irish ‘end point’, which makes tracking the cultural...