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

1. Icelandic Landscapes

30 I celandic nature, particularly in its extreme manifestations of volcanoes and glaciers and their potential to create natural disasters, has long fascinated travelers. The striking idea of a land shaped by fire and ice grips the memories of visitors, even as the tourist industry has rendered the image cliché. There is a basis for the “fire and ice” cliché; nature in Iceland does exert a powerful force on the landscape. Iceland sits on a mid-Atlantic tectonic plate boundary that is slowly being forced apart as new rock is pushed to the earth’s surface, forcing the two plates farther away from each other. This geological circumstance makes many parts of Iceland seem to be continuously under construction—barren, rough, and bearing the imprints of recent cataclysms (fig. 1). While lush green meadows, fields of flowers, and 1 | iCelandiC landsCaPes natural histories and national histories Early in the morning of our second day of driving we came to a junction in the main dirt road. A primitive jeep trail split off, marked by a sign that pointed across a vast, barren volcanic plain: “Kverkfjöll—105 km.” Civilization ends here; we had crossed Iceland’s green, inhabited circumference. . . . We bounced onto the jeep trail and the clock whirred backward. . . . It seemed we had entered a time before life began—before cars, houses, animals, bushes, or birds. . . . Along with related cataclysms and natural disasters, [volcanic] eruptions have shaped Iceland’s history in somewhat the same manner that the histories of other European nations have been shaped by war.—Peter Stark (1994) iCelandiC landsCaPes 31 even trees—despite a history of soil erosion and deforestation—are also a part of the Icelandic landscape, these are far less frequently pictured and remembered than the more dramatic mountains, lava fields, and icebergs, all of which usually contrast sharply with travelers’ home terrain. Visitors came to Iceland with the desire to see natural phenomena not found at home; they often overlooked the more mundane features of the Icelandic natural world, instead heading straight for the geysers and glaciers. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travelers to the island frequently used dramatic language in describing Icelandic nature as remarkable, unique, and completely different from the landscapes, flora, and fauna they knew at home. A participant on Joseph Banks’s 1772 expeFig . 1 An Icelandic landscape on the Sprengisandur road (the northern part between Kiðagil and Bárðardalur). Sprengisandur crosses the interior of Iceland, which was the legendary home of outlaws and trolls. The tower of rocks in the foreground is a typical path marker in Iceland. Photo courtesy of Ingibjörg Eiríksdóttir. 32 iCelandiC landsCaPes dition to Iceland, Uno von Troil, a Swedish student of Linnaeus who later became the bishop of Uppsala, wrote on the very first page of his Letters on Iceland, “I was happy to come to a country where many traces of our ancient language still existed, and where I was certain to catch a glimpse of the most unusual aspects of nature.”1 Three-quarters of a century later, Ida Pfeiffer, the wife of an Austrian civil servant, echoed von Troil’s expression when she spoke of her hope of finding in Iceland “nature in a garb such as she wears nowhere else.”2 The idea of traveling in order to find natural extremes and wonders was, of course, not uncommon in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, and Iceland and the other North Atlantic countries were far from the only exotic regions spoken of in these terms. At this time, European journeys both northward and southward were expected to bring the traveler faceto -face with the unusual. In the genre of northern voyages, probably the most well-known and striking example of this trope occurs on the opening pages of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, when the narrator Robert Walton is onboard a ship, headed north from St. Petersburg toward Archangel , where he will meet Victor Frankenstein and hear his sad tale. Walton writes to his sister that even though the North Pole is often pictured as the “seat of frost and desolation,” it “presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight,” and he imagines it as a country “ruled by different laws and in which numerous circumstances enforce a belief that the aspect of nature differs essentially from anything of which we have any experience.” He further explains that...