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IMC 2022: Sessions

Session 538: After the Icelandic Commonwealth, I: (Re)Imagining Iceland

Tuesday 5 July 2022, 09.00-10.30

Organiser:Basil Price, Department of English, Arizona State University
Moderator/Chair:Tom Morcom, Faculty of English Language & Literature, University of Oxford
Paper 538-aIceland and the World: Constructing Storyworlds and Retelling the Past in Late Medieval Iceland
(Language: English)
Rebecca Merkelbach, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, University of Cambridge
Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Scandinavian
Paper 538-b'I will go nowhere': Futurity in the Political Landscapes of Njáls Saga and Grettis Saga
(Language: English)
Basil Price, Department of English, Arizona State University
Index terms: Language and Literature - Scandinavian, Political Thought
Paper 538-cTalking about the Weather: Hauksbók, Eco-History, and Elite Identity in 14th-Century Iceland
(Language: English)
Adam Bierstedt, Faculty of Icelandic & Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Iceland, Reykjavík
Index terms: Language and Literature - Scandinavian, Mentalities
Abstract

This is the first panel in a series on 'Iceland in the Medieval World', focusing on discursive navigations of the social, cultural, and political position of Iceland, after the island became part of the kingdom of Norway in 1262-1264. This panel considers how Old-Norse Icelandic texts imagined medieval Iceland, and the position of this island in narrative, temporal, and metaphysical worlds. These papers play on anthropologist Barbara Bender's proposal that 'landscape is time materializing' to consider how later medieval texts narrate the geological, meteorological, and historic past of Iceland in order to make sense of a politically uncertain and socially insecure present.