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

Reviewed by: Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic Arne Kaijser (bio) Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic . By Karen Oslund. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. Pp. 280. $35. On 25 August 1772 the brig Sir Lawrence arrived at Reykjavik after a rough trip from England. The ship was hired by Sir Joseph Banks, who brought with him a team for making an exploratory expedition, including the botanist and Linné disciple Daniel Solander and a young Swedish student, Uno von Troil, who would later become an archbishop. Von Troil wrote a book about this expedition, describing the strange landscapes the group saw, the native population they encountered, and the hardships they met traveling through Iceland and climbing the volcano Hekla. This book was translated to several languages and spurred an interest in Iceland and the whole North Atlantic region, and many other European travelers made similar voyages in the following two centuries. In Iceland Imagined, Karen Oslund examines how some of these travelers experienced and envisioned Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. In particular, she analyzes how visitors to the North Atlantic region experienced its landscape and nature, its technology and material culture, and its language and literary heritage. She also analyzes some examples of travels in the opposite direction, and how inhabitants from the North Atlantic experienced Denmark, England, and other places. Oslund's approach is inspired by Edward Said's classical book Orientalism (1978), where he concluded that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational "other," contrasted with the rational West. The North Atlantic also served as a contrast to Europe, she argues, but in a somewhat different way. Here the categories of "self" and "other" became less distinct; this region was on the periphery of Europe, largely inhabited by people who originated from Norway with a rich cultural past in the "sagas" from medieval times. Some of the travelers emphasized the similarities with continental Europe, while others focused on the contrasts. One chapter describes how Icelandic landscapes were described and depicted by different actors and over time. While many of the early visitors emphasized the wild, harsh, and almost diabolic character of the lava landscapes and the volcanoes that shaped them, Danish travelers and artists in the late nineteenth century instead depicted serene grass meadows with volcanoes only in the far distance. These images of unthreatening landscapes served to demonstrate how Iceland was an integral part of the Danish kingdom, not so different from heathlands in Jutland. Contemporary Icelandic painters instead sought out the wild and barren landscapes, wanting to illustrate the sufferings of Icelanders under Danish rule. [End Page 702] Iceland Imagined is not easy to categorize in a specific academic field, as the narrative moves swiftly and elegantly over unusual grounds. Some chapters lean toward cultural and environmental history. Other chapters discuss the multilayered literary history and linguistics of the North Atlantic, with Danish as the administrative language spoken by officials and people of higher standing, while the large majority only spoke Icelandic, Faroese, or Inuit languages. One chapter leans toward history of technology and material culture. Here, Oslund focuses on Greenland, and points out that Europeans had an ambivalent relation to the technologies of the Inuit. Many observers admired their clothing, kayaks, dogsleds, harpoons, and other tools, which were so well adapted to the harsh conditions in Greenland, as well as the skills with which they used these tools for killing seals, whales, fish, polar bears, and other animals. In fact, the European presence in Greenland depended on these skills, since export of sealskin, whale oil, and baleen was its economic ground. Also, polar explorers like Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary adopted Inuit techniques such as dogsleds and harpoons for their expeditions. But the admiration for these tools was combined with a condescending view of the Inuit for the lack of improvement and development of these same tools. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe the cult of industrial progress implied that its lack was seen as deficient moral state. The final chapter discusses two present-day controversies on Iceland. One concerns a biotech firm, deCODE genetics, striving to create a genetic database of...

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