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

2. Nordic by Nature

61 O n his outward voyage from Copenhagen to the Faroe Islands in 1828, the German bird enthusiast Carl Julian Graba noted his sighting of “the first Northern birds” (die ersten Vögel des Nordens ) of the voyage off the coasts of the Shetland Islands. Although he had previously spotted this bird—the Atlantic gannet (sula alba)—off the Danish coasts at the beginning of his journey, he did not regard Denmark as the genuine native territory (Heimat) of the bird. Even though he had already traveled north from Kiel to Copenhagen in order to begin the seagoing leg of his journey, he apparently did not consider Denmark to be part of the “North”; the edges of the North only began with the North Atlantic islands.1 2 | nordiC By nature Classifying and Controlling Flora and Fauna in iceland Iceland can not be entirely separated from the Scandinavian countries. From the point of view of the historian or linguist, it is the place of the origins of the Scandinavian people, their traditions, language, and poetry; from the point of view of the physicist, of the naturalist, Iceland is, in a similar way, the source of Scandinavian climate and regular and irregular phenomena.—Paul Gaimard and Xavier Marmier (1842) 62 nordiC By nature Wherever the boundaries were drawn, Graba’s reference to a “Northern bird” reflects a European nineteenth-century taxonomy of living beings, which held that different types of plants and animals developed and thrived in different climatic zones, and that these climatic zones could be mapped through identifying the natural ranges of individual flora and fauna. Brian W. Ogilvie traces the roots of this idea back to the Renaissance , arguing that during the sixteenth century “wide travel, combined with careful attention to the small distinctions between different kinds of plants, led to a view of Europe as a patchwork of different floras, with a clear line separating northern from Mediterranean floras and subtle differences within them.”2 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European knowledge about different kinds of local floras and faunas increased, as sets of handbooks and atlases, each confining themselves to a particular region, appeared, with the goal of exactly and completely tabulating all the plants and animals existing in a circumscribed area.3 During the eighteenth century, as James L. Larson discusses, both of the two major competing theories of natural history—the Linnaean and Buffonian—used these handbooks and atlases as the data to support their claims. Each theory, however, offered a different explanation for development of the different types of local nature or climatic variation.4 According to the Swedish scientist Carl von Linné, known as Linnaeus, each animal and plant found the physical environment for which it was most suited. As the waters of the biblical Flood had receded, the land mass steadily increased, and through migration and dissemination from the single point of Noah’s landing, animals and plants found their proper places on the globe. Regions of similar physical conditions, such as mountains or lowland areas, were therefore inhabited by similar types of flora and fauna. Linnaeus’s French colleague Comte de Buffon, who opposed him on many points, countered him in this respect as well, especially stressing the differences between animals in Europe and in the Americas. Similar environmental conditions did not necessarily indicate similar types of plants and animals. Rather, different types were produced at distinct moments in the earth’s history, in a long global cooling process during which larger and more vigorous animals developed before the smaller ones, when the earth was warmer and more productive, according to Buffon. As the earth cooled, the larger animals then migrated to the warmer areas of the earth, the equatorial regions, while the smaller ones who did not require so much heat remained near the poles. Thus, as in other aspects of their work, on nordiC By nature 63 the question of local or climatic natures, Buffon took a position marked by its emphasis on changes over time, while Linnaeus’s system focused on a taxonomic classification of the existing state of nature. Common to both theories, however, and to eighteenth-century life science in general, was the idea that each species had its proper place on the globe, a Heimat where it belonged and had been designed by the Creator to be. One of the goals of eighteenth-century travel was a mapping of this design...