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Research article2015Peer reviewed

Nationalist heritage, sublime affect and the anomalous Icelandic landscape concept

Olwig, Kenneth

Abstract

Olwig, K.R. 2015. Nationalist heritage, sublime affect and the anomalous Icelandic landscape concept. Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift-Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol. 69, 277-287. ISSN 0029-1951.The idea of landscape has undergone change, as has the physical landscape, under differing historical, technological, ideological and representational contexts. The article is concerned with the way modern imaginaries of landscape have been read back into the past in order to naturalize, essentialize and legitimize a particular imagined political, economic and physical national heritage. The image of Icelandic landnam, understood as the settlement of the naturally bounded, wild, sublime, virginal nature of Iceland encountered by rugged and free Nordic Vikings, speaking a pure Nordic language, played a foundational mythic role in particularly 19th century Nordic and Germanic national romanticism. This was because Iceland provided an apparent means of ground-truthing the nationalism, coupled with economic liberalism, that the national romantics promoted. The article examines the ways that such romantic nativist ideas of national character, as something embedded in a people through the esthetic experience of raw sublime nature, continue to operate on Iceland, and far beyond the boundaries of Norden, in a modern world of freebooting financiers, offshore neoliberal economics and renewed nationalistic fervor. The modern international role of the physical landscape in this ideology is exemplified by a case from Mexico, whereas Iceland exemplifies the continued vitality of this ideational landscape.

Keywords

Icelandic; landscape; language heritage; nationalism; sublime affect

Published in

Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift / Norwegian Journal of Geography
2015, Volume: 69, number: 5, pages: 277-287
Publisher: ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD