Pilgrims to Thule

The depiction of religion, spirituality, and/or the ‘supernatural’ in travel writing, and more generally interconnections between religion and tourism, form a broad and growing field of research in the study of religions. This contribution presents the first study in this field that tackles tourism in and travel writing about Iceland. Using three contrasting pairs of German and English travelogues from the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 2010s, it illustrates a number of shared trends in the treatment of religion, religious history, and the supernatural in German and English travel writing about Iceland, as well as a shift that happened in recent decades, where the interests of travel writers seem to have undergone a marked change and Iceland appears to have turned from a land of ancient Northern mythology into a country ‘where people still believe in elves’. The article tentatively correlates this shift with a change in the Icelandic self-representation, highlights a number of questions arising from both this shift and its seeming correlation with Icelandic strategies of tourism marketing, and notes a number of perspectives in which Iceland can be a highly relevant topic for the research field of religion and tourism.</p

Pedestrian Research or Walking as Method

In the history of religions, both places and stories play a central role: places are where human religious life plays itself out – ‘takes place’ –, while telling stories is one of the main ways how human beings communicate about the invisible others that are gods, saints, spirits, and magic powers. This article will discuss how fieldwork-based research can bring both places and stories together. A substantial category of supernatural storytelling consists in narratives that are connected to specific locations in the physical landscape, such as narratives about manifestations of supernatural entities or foundation legends. The article explains how it can be a fruitful approach to such narratives to systematically walk both the sites and the connecting routes between the sites that these stories are associated with. In analogy to the technique of a ‘close reading’ in the study of literature, a ‘close walking’ of story places can help to establish their contexts in everyday life, including aspects such as land use, economy, social frames of reference, or topography. Sometimes it can even shed light on the composition of narratives, as lines of sight in the physical topography can interrelate with the motifs used in a story

The Fluidity of Tradition: Place-Names, Travelogues, and Medieval Tales of the Western Icelandic Shoreline

This article discusses the fundamental fluidity of Icelandic place-lore. It approaches this topic through the example of the settlement of Auðr the Deep-Minded in western Iceland as described by the thirteenth-century ‘Book of Settlements’ (Landnámabók). I undertake an analysis of this medieval account, which places a central focus on the naming and narrative interpretation of the local landscape of the Hvammsfjörður fjord, with recourse to material preserved in nineteenth-century travel writing, folklore, and toponymy. I then relate my findings to classic perspectives in landscape theory and highlight the extreme ambivalences that become visible in the landscape construction represented by this material if one considers its linguistic minutiae

The Grave Mound of a Saga Hero : A Case Study in Context and ‘Continuity’ between Grettis saga and Modern Folklore

ABSTRACT: The article presents a case study within the recent renaissance of folkloristic approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic religious history and saga literature. It undertakes a comparative analysis of medieval literary and recent local traditions about the burial of Ǫnundr Wooden-Foot, who was the great-grandfather of Grettir the Strong and an important character in the introductory chapters of Grettis saga. First, the article lays out the different accounts of Ǫnundr’s burial in medieval literature. Second, it contrasts the literary accounts with a broad range of more recent local traditions. Furthermore, it brings the physical topography of Ǫnundr’s alleged burial site into the discussion. The article then uses this ensemble of data to problematise issues such as the relative importance of chronological vs. geographical distance between a narrative and its alleged object, throwing new light on the relevance of recent local traditions for understanding medieval saga accounts. RESUME: Denne artikel præsenterer en case study inden for den folkloristiske tilgang til studiet af oldnordisk og oldislandsk religionshistorie og sagalitteratur. Den byder på en komparativ analyse af litterære middelalderkilder samt nyere, lokale traditioner om begravelsen af Ǫnundr Træfod, som var oldefar til Grettir den Stærke og en vigtig figur i de indledende kapitler af Grettis saga. Først fremstiller artiklen forskellige beretninger om Ǫnundrs begravelse ifølge middelalderlitteraturen. Derpå kontrasteres disse beretninger med en bred vifte af nyere, lokale traditioner. I tillæg diskuteres den konkrete topografi omkring Ǫnundrs påståede gravsted. Derpå bruger artiklen denne samling af data til at problematisere aspekter såsom den kronologiske kontra den geografiske afstand mellem fortællingen og dens genstand. Herved kastes der nyt lys på lokale traditioners relevans i forhold til vores forståelse af sagaberetninger fra middelalderen