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

The question of how geographical and religious ideas are transmitted through time and space is one with wide-ranging implications for understanding how cross-cultural influences and connections develop and propagate in different historical contexts. In his contribution to this important field, Matthias Egeler traces the origins of transmarine otherworlds in medieval Norse and Irish texts: islands of immortality and blessedness that may have their origins in far older cultural traditions. As Egeler sets out in his introduction, this is not an attempt to establish lost original forms or reconstruct prototypes. Rather, his interest is in "people rather than ideas, on otherworlds which were thought to be real rather than on works of literature for their own sake" (p. 3). This is a premise with great potential, although given the considerable breadth and depth of the material included in the analysis, it is hard to gauge whether the objective has been achieved fully by the end of the study.

The analysis of chapter 1 ("North Western Europe: Scandinavia, Ireland, and the Land of the Living") sets the tone for the monograph as a whole, which is meticulous in its attention to textual detail. Focusing on three key regions of Old Norse textual tradition—Vínland ("Wine-Land"), Hvítramannaland ("The Land of White Men"), and Ódáinsakr/Glæsisvellir ("Field of the Not-Dead"/"Shining Field")—Egeler begins by drawing parallels with geographical texts of medieval Irish tradition, particularly the Voyage of Bran, Connlae's Journey to the Otherworld, and The Voyage of St. Brendan. These Norse geographical myths, he suggests, are at least partially inspired by Irish concepts, as "transmarine paradises [that] all belong to the same religious-historical, social, and cultural context" (pp. 104–105). Despite the non-Christian elements in the Voyage of Bran and Connlae's Journey, Egeler demonstrates their significant Christian underpinnings, which may, he argues, have influenced the development of the "Blessed Isle" motif in Old Norse texts. Deciding how much of the texts to summarize for the reader is always a difficult balancing act in analyses of this kind, and Egeler's do tend towards the overly lengthy at times. Some of the most convincing parts of the analysis are those that explore the interaction between Christian and non-Christian elements in both cultural traditions. Rather harder to prove are direct links between much of the Norse and Irish material, a problem that becomes more acute in the following chapter on the possible classical origins of these myths. Egeler's closing remarks on the localization of folklore tropes in the Icelandic landscape are particularly thought-provoking. He focuses on Hvanndalur, a remote valley in northern Iceland that runs parallel to the Héðinsfjord. Starting in the seventeenth century, there are a number of references to the Ódáinsakr being located in this area, making it "not just a land of myth, but a concrete place in a specific locality in northern Iceland" (p. 94). More curiously, Hvanndalur is also identified in the Book of Settlements as the location of the bloodiest land-right dispute in the landnám period. Egeler's perceptive, nuanced comments on this juxtaposition between folkloric traditions and physical landscapes are among the most original elements of the study, picked up again in the appendix where he returns to "the spatiality of geographical myth" (p. 298) on a broader, more philosophical scale.

Chapter 2 ("The Classical Mediterranean: Rome, Greece, and the Islands of the Blessed") jumps back in time to trace the motif of the "Blessed Isle" from its Greek and Roman beginnings up to the Christian writers of Late Antiquity. The discussion opens with the Homeric epics (from c. 700 BC) and the suggestion that the Odyssey and Hesiod's Works and Days in particular define the motif's early form: "an insular land...