Search results
From Iceland to the Americas, an anthology of thirteen original critical essays, is an exercise in the reception of a small historical fact with wide-ranging social, cultural, and imaginative consequences. Medieval records claim that around the year 1000 Leif Eiriksson and other Nordic explorers sailed westwards from Iceland and Greenland to a place they called Vinland. Archaeological evidence has in fact verified this claim, though primarily by way of one small, short-lived Norse settlement in Newfoundland, which may not even have been Leif’s. Whether or not this settlement was his, however, the contact associated with him has had an outsized impact on cultural imagination in and of the Americas. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, indeed, novels, poetry, history, politics, arts and crafts, comics, films and video games have all reflected a rising interest in the medieval Norse and their North American presence. Uniquely in reception studies, From Iceland to the Americas approaches this dynamic between Nordic history and its reception by bringing together international authorities on mythology, language, film, and cultural studies, as well as on the literature that has dominated critical reception. Collectively, the essays not only explore the connections among medieval Iceland and the modern Americas, but also probe why medieval contact has become a modern cultural touchstone.
Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) advocates rigorous gender-based analyses to inform intervention programmes ( UN OCHA, 2021 ). Key humanitarian and development donors have also placed an emphasis on gender equality when evaluating funding decisions. The OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), for example, encourages its members to track and report gender equality results achieved by projects in order to ensure that they do not reproduce or exacerbate gender inequalities ( OECD, 2016 ). While most OECD donors stay to the minimum, governments such as Canada, Iceland
In an ironic vein, Oscar Wilde reportedly once said something along the lines that the Icelanders were the most ingenious people in the world, for not only did they discover America, they also had ‘the good sense to lose it again’. Like others before me, I have failed to locate the original source of this quotation. 1 But the fact that it can be found on a great number of websites and is repeated over and over again in the (Icelandic) media is in itself more relevant than the question of the quotation’s authenticity. Its popularity may indicate that it
From America to Iceland ‘The Yankee is here; his feet tread [Iceland’s] heath-clad hills and snow-covered mountains. He has boiled his dinner in the hot-springs, cooled his punch in snow a hundred years old, and toasted his shins by a volcanic fire’, declared Pliny Miles in his 1854 account of travel to Iceland, Norðurfari, or, Rambles in Iceland . 1 From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, not least with the advent of steamship passage, Iceland became increasingly accessible for tourists looking to marvel at natural wonders and wax lyrical about sublimely
This book analyses the contemporary politics of the nation states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and the Home Rule territories of Greenland, Faeroes and Åland that together make up the Nordic region. It covers Scandinavia past and present, parties in developmental perspective, the Scandinavian party system model, the Nordic model of government, the Nordic welfare model, legislative-executive relations in the region, and the changing security environment. The Nordic states have a shared history, common linguistic bonds and a common state Lutheran religion. Of the six Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are mutually intelligible, whilst Swedish is an official national language in Finland. Turning to a brief overview of nation-building and state-building in the Nordic region, an obvious distinction can be drawn between those 'stateless nations' which went on to achieve statehood and the territories that have not achieved independence. The book presents a brief chronology of events in Norden up to 1922, when Åland achieved autonomy. In Sweden the historic phase of party-building produced a basic two-plus-three configuration and a party system based on five 'isms': communism, social democracy, agrarianism, liberalism and conservatism. By 1930 there was a bifurcated parliamentary left and a fragmented nonsocialist bloc consisting of essentially town-based Liberal and Conservative parties and a farmer-based Agrarian Party. Whilst acknowledging the limitations inherent in the periodisation of party system change, the book focuses on the extent of party system change since the 'earthquake elections' of 1970-73.
Iceland, sea ice, and scholars The sea ice … has been the most important causal factor in the dearth-years, price-rises and famines, and has done more harm to the Icelandic population than all the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. 1 (Thoroddsen, 1914 : 205) This chapter is concerned with the sea ice
5 ARTlines: three walking artists in Iceland Patti Lean In August 2015, I made a month-long camping and walking journey in Iceland, in the company of co-artists Julie Livsey and Lesley Hicks. This is a record of that journey, and of ways in which it informed our practice as artists. Drawing from examples of our own work, and other works of visual art and writing encountered through the journey, I position our activities within a historical, practical and theoretical framework, and I also investigate contemporary interdisciplinary practice and ways in which
, however, like Icelandic communists and married couple Þóra Vigfúsdóttir (1894–1980) and Kristinn E. Andrésson (1901–73), stayed loyal to Stalin and Soviet-style communism, even in the face of massive criticism at home and abroad. 2 Kristinn and Þóra were both devoted socialists and admirers of the Soviet Union. They became members of the Icelandic Communist Party in the 1930s and the subsequent Socialist Party when it was established in 1938; Þóra and Kristinn spent their adult lives working for the socialist cause and
Early on in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth ( Voyage au centre de la Terre , 1864), the young narrator comes upon his uncle, a German professor of mineralogy, poring over a rare text. The manuscript, a copy of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla , baffles the boy, and he assumes his uncle reads it in a German translation. Professor Lidenbrock replies: ‘A translation! What would I be doing with your translation? Who’s bothered about your translation? This is the original work, in Icelandic: that magnificent language, both simple and rich