Matthias Egeler, Stefanie Gropper (eds.

Dreaming of a Glacier
Snæfellsjökull in a Geocritical Perspective
 Münchner Nordistische Studien
herausgegeben von
Wilhelm Heizmann und Joachim Schiedermair

Band 45

Titelbild: Basketballkorb ‘Snæfell’ auf Flatey, Breiðafjörður. © M. Egeler, 2019.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword (Matthias Egeler and Stefanie Gropper) ................7

Introduction
Geocriticism, Place, and Landscape: Theoretical Perspectives
on Space, Meaning, and Memory (Matthias Egeler) ............. 17

Material Culture and Social Practice

Invisible Force: The Absence of Folk Legends about
Snæfellsjökull (Terry Gunnell) ................................................43
Sönghellir: the Singing Cave (Árni Hjartarson, Guðmundur J.
Guðmundsson, and Lilja B. Pálsdóttir) .................................. 64

Literature
Snæfellsnes, the Glacier, and the Settlement of Iceland in the
Book of Settlements, or: Snæfellsjökull as a Non-Entity
(Matthias Egeler)...................................................................... 87
Man and Mountain: Snæfellsjökull and Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss
(Ármann Jakobsson) ..............................................................103
6

From Johann Anderson to W.G. Collingwood: Snæfellsjökull

in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Travelogues (Alessia
Bauer) ...................................................................................... 117
Sneffels/Stromboli: The Volcanic Mountain and its Mise en
abyme in Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre (Katharina
Simon) ..................................................................................... 155
A Place of Desire, a Hideaway, or a Site of Crime:
Snæfellsjökull and Snæfellsnes in Modern Icelandic Literature
(Regina Jucknies) ................................................................... 187

Visual Media
The Cinematic Mysteries of Snæfellsjökull
(Hanna Eglinger) ................................................................... 229
Between Prospect and Geology: Snæfellsjökull in Art
(Haraldur Sigurðsson) ........................................................... 266
An Artist’s Personal View: Anne Herzog and Snæfellsjökull
(Anne Herzog)........................................................................ 287

Postscript
The Presence of Absence: Snæfellsjökull in Newsprint
(Stefanie Gropper and Matthias Egeler) ............................... 315
 7

Foreword
Matthias Egeler and Stefanie Gropper

This book aims to outline the place of the volcano Snæfellsjökull in

the European imagination, which through Jules Verne’s novel
Voyage au centre de la Terre has become Iceland’s most famous
mountain. The articles in this book bring together as broad a range
of sometimes very different, though often interlinked, perspectives
on the glacier mountain and its surrounding landscape as has been
possible. This includes both the way how Snæfellsjökull was turned
into a ›mountain of the mind‹, looming as large in literature, art,
and popular culture as in topographical reality, and the way in
which the concrete local topography of the western tip of
Snæfellsness was charged with ›meaning‹ – or, sometimes,
strikingly wasn’t.
Our primary starting point and main methodological focus has
been the paradigm of geocriticism, though we have not felt
compelled to adopt a geocritical approach slavishly. To some extent,
we have used geocriticism merely to open up questions and
perspectives, without allowing it to restrict our view.1 Geocriticism
represents a paradigm focusing on the relationship between
narratives (in the broadest possible sense of the term) and specific
places. Its most detailed programmatic book – Bertrand Westphal’s
La géocritique – stems from the French tradition of literary theory.2
At the core of Westphal’s concept of geocriticism lies a shift of
focus from author to place: his approach is geocentred in that it

1 For other important approaches to ›landscape‹ and its semantisation and

interpretation cf., for instance, Macfarlane 2008; Schama 1996; Tilley 1994.
2 Westphal 2007; Westphal 2011.
8

does not analyse the œuvre of a writer, but works regarding a specific
geographical unit. By shifting the focus from the perception (and/or
imagination) of a single author to the way in which a single place
has been perceived by a wide range of writers, Westphal’s approach
aims to achieve a deeper, pluralistic image of the places studied in a
synchronic as well as diachronic perspective. It is central for the
geocritical approach that this understanding is not a purely textual
one: Westphal never tires to emphasise the interconnectedness
between fiction and reality, how the literary treatments of places
are never completely separable from their physical reality but at the
same time influence our perception of this reality so much that they
in turn constitute a major factor in the way that perceived ›reality‹ is
constructed. How we see a place always is coloured by what we
have read or heard about it. At the centre of geocriticism are
inhabited places, places that are lived-in and experienced, the
question of how they are experienced, and how this experience is
reflected in and influenced by texts. Or in other words: geocriticism
is not about texts, but about the interaction between texts – and
other artistic expressions – and the physical places that humans
experience; an experience for which mental concepts (as reflected in
and influenced by texts) are just as important as the physical,
›objective‹ properties of a space.
The most central methodological tenet of Westphal’s
geocriticism, which he proposes in order to grasp this interaction
between text and place, is multifocalisation. Multifocalisation is a
formulation of the geocentred approach which does not focus on
the single author but on the multitude of perspectives that a variety
of authors (or painters, film-makers, travellers, etc.) have on a single
place. Instead of focusing on one individual presentation of a place,
the geocritical approach aims at forming a composite picture based
on a range of different presentations to gain a more balanced
understanding of the way in which the place in question is
conceptualised. If one includes such multiple, multifocal
perspectives, the result of the enquiry will never be a simple,
monolithic image of a place. Rather, such an approach can
 9

contribute to a more holistic perception of a place in all its

complexity, it can grasp its inner tensions and contradictions and
help to avoid simplistic stereotypes.
In this spirit, this volume is geocentrically focused on
Snæfellsjökull and brings together, uniting them into one vista of
this particular landscape, a broad (multifocal) range of treatments,
imaginations, and narratives about this mountain and its
surroundings. We hope that the resulting collection of essays
develops an – if preliminary and tentative – multifocal and
mulitcoloured picture of the (narrative, cultural, mental, imaginary,
artistic) cosmos which has been created around this mountain. This
picture tries not to focus on any one period, but brings together
perspectives ranging from medieval saga literature to the present.
Thus, this tentative reconstruction of the cosmos of the
Snæfellsjökull mountain also aims to include the perspective of
time, reconstructing some of the main strata and main lines of
development that have contributed to forming today’s picture(s) of
this glacier.
The articles in our book cover a broad range of works, from
medieval texts to modern literature, graffiti, film, and art. Thus, for
instance, in addition to analyses of literary texts like the medieval
Icelandic Bárðar saga and Halldór Laxness’s novel Christianity under
the Glacier, it includes a survey of the graffiti of Sönghellir,
including the numerous cross carvings and Christograms found in
the cave: while anything but extensive literary texts, these symbols
still imprint implied narratives (the Christian history and hope of
salvation) into the materiality of the mountain, and by the very act
of evoking the Christian hope of salvation in dozens of repetitions
they demonstrate that for their carvers the ›mountain of the mind‹
that was Snæfellsjökull was hovering on the edge of nightmare.
Thus, these graffiti offer a perspective on the glacier that is very
different from the views expressed by Bárður Snæfellsáss and Síra
Jón Prímus, both of whom had a deep sympathy and longing for
this mountain and wished to enter it at the end of their life. It is a
central argument of our volume that none of these different
10

perspectives is intrinsically more important than the other, that

none should be marginalised, and that they all form an important
part of what Snæfellsjökull ›is‹ and ›was‹ (meaning: is and has been
perceived as and imagined to be).
The volume is organised in thematic blocks. After a short
introduction, in which Matthias Egeler summarises the theoretical
approach of geocriticism, the first block engages with Material
Culture and Social Practice. Here, Terry Gunnell’s chapter Invisible
Force: The Absence of Folk Legends about Snæfellsjökull makes a
striking observation: when looking at Snæfellsjökull in folk
legends, we do not meet the looming presence we would have
expected, but rather a gaping absence. Thus, already in this first
contribution we are jolted to wonder whether Snæfellsjökull is not
a much more complex thing than we had thought and deserves
more scholarly attention than it has hitherto received. For, of
course, the remarkable absence of Snæfellsjökull in local folklore is
not what we would have thought we would find. Continuing along
the lines of the unexpected, the next contribution as well turns to
something that is not normally studied in connection with
Snæfellsjökull: graffiti. The graffiti found in Sönghellir: The Singing
Cave, are introduced by Árni Hjartarson, Guðmundur J.
Guðmundsson, and Lilja B. Pálsdóttir. These graffiti allow us a
glimpse of the experience of Snæfellsjökull by early Icelandic
travellers, which they expressed through the act of carving rather
than storytelling but which nonetheless forms an important aspect
of the Icelandic perception of the glacier mountain – and a hitherto
unstudied one.
The next thematic block engages with Literature. This block as
well starts with pointing out a remarkable absence: the absence of
Snæfellsjökull from the account of Landnámabók, the medieval
Icelandic Book of Settlements. In his Snæfellsnes, the Glacier, and the
Settlement of Iceland in the Book of Settlements, or: Snæfellsjökull as a
Non-Entity, Matthias Egeler highlights a second time, this time on
the basis of the early written corpus, that it is not a given that
Snæfellsjökull as a landscape feature has any kind of meaning for
 11

the people living around it. Rather, such meaning is socially

constructed in a process which starts to become visible only in
rather later literary texts. During the Middle Ages, the most central
literary testimony for this contruction of the meaning of
Snæfellsjökull is Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, which is introduced by
Ármann Jakobsson’s contribution on Man and Mountain:
Snæfellsjökull and Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss. In this chapter, Ármann
Jakobsson shows aspects of how this construction of the meaning
of Snæfellsjökull happens in the first medieval text that engages
with Snæfellsjökull in any kind of detail.
The following chapters of the literary block then engage with
outsiders’ perceptions of Snæfellsjökull before finally returning to
its treatment in Icelandic literature. Alessia Bauer surveys
treatments of the mountain in travel writing, presenting an analysis
that ranges From Johann Anderson to W.G. Collingwood:
Snæfellsjökull in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Travelogues.
Another non-Icelandic – in this case French – perspective on
Snæfellsjökull as a place of travel is elucidated by Katharina Simon:
in her essay Sneffels/Stromboli: The Volcanic Mountain and its ›Mise
en abyme‹ in Jules Verne’s ›Voyage au centre de la Terre‹, she engages
with the mountain’s use as the entrance to the centre of the earth by
Jules Verne. After this discussion of the work of the famous French
novelist, the literary block closes by proceeding to the treatment of
the mountain in Icelandic literature in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries: the broad spectrum of ways in which Snæfellsjökull
maintains its role in literature still in this recent period is shown by
Regina Jucknies in her essay A Place of Desire, a Hideaway, or a Site
of Crime: Snæfellsjökull and Snæfellsnes in Modern Icelandic Literature.
The volume’s last thematic block then turns to Visual Media.
For travel writers, saga heroes, and novelists are not the only ones
who each had their own perspective on Snæfellsjökull. The
mountain looms large in the visual arts as well. One of the most
important contemporary media of artistic expression is film.
Snæfellsjökull in film is introduced by Hanna Eglinger’s chapter on
The Cinematic Mysteries of Snæfellsjökull, which covers cinematic
12

material as diverse as the Swedish film Atlanten (1995) by Kristian

Petri, Henry Levin’s film adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel from
1959, and the film adaptation of Halldór Laxness’s novel
Christianity under the Glacier (1968) by Laxness’s own daughter
Guðný Halldórsdóttir from 1989. After this foray into the world of
filmmaking, Haraldur Sigurðsson and Anne Herzog give us
glimpses of Snæfellsjökull in the media of painting and
photography. Haraldur Sigurðsson in his contribution Between
Prospect and Geology: Snæfellsjökull in Art presents an overview of
the history of Snæfellsjökull as a motif in landscape painting. This,
in a manner which we hope will not be deemed too experimental, is
followed by a contribution which leaves the plain of scholarly
analysis: in her essay Snæfellsjökull Volcano, Iceland, 2004-2017: An
Artist’s Personal View, the French painter and photographer Anne
Herzog allows us a glimpse of her personal relationship to the
mountain. Herzog is an art practitioner rather than a scholar of art,
and thus her contribution is an artistic and self-reflective rather
than a scholarly one which adds a very differnt register to what
otherwise is a collection of academic essays. After this, the editors
close the volume with a postscript on The Presence of Absence:
Snæfellsjökull in Newsprint, in which they discuss what currently
appears to be the mountain’s main feature in current news
reporting: the melting of the glacier from which it derives its name.
With this volume, we hope to make a contribution to
scholarship on at least two levels. When it comes to the rock-base
of the material evidence, this volume presents the first book-length
study of the cultural history of Snæfellsjökull. Since Snæfellsjökull,
not least due to the success of Jules Verne’s novel, is Iceland’s most
famous mountain, such a study is both justified and long overdue.
Several of the contributions in this volume are groundbreaking in
that they are the very first to tackle their objects: nobody before
Árni Hjartarson, Guðmundur J. Guðmundsson, and Lilja B.
Pálsdóttir has treated the Sönghellir graffiti, and nobody before
Haraldur Sigurðsson has tried to survey the role of Snæfellsjökull in
 13

art history, and these two chapters are not the only ones in this
volume which are the first to grapple with their respective topics.
On a more abstract level, beyond the focus on Snæfellsjökull as
such, this volume hopes to show the potential which an integrative
geocentred approach can have for the study of northern European
cultural history. Bringing a variety of different perspectives
together can create a total that is greater than the sum of its parts:
given how large Snæfellsjökull looms in the modern-day
imagination of everybody interested in Iceland, it was equally
surprising for editors and contributors alike, for instance, how
markedly absent Snæfellsjökull can be from places where we would
have expected it to be important, both in the early stratum of
medieval literature in Landnámabók and in the more recent stratum
of local folklore. A given entity is not equally important, nor is it
treated equally, for and by everybody or from everybody’s
perspective. Bringing together contrasting perspectives substantially
deepens our understanding of our objects of study and preserves us
from simplistic views which merely reflect a single hegemonic
perspective that for some reason has managed to become dominant
and that has come to overshadow other perspectives which should
be seen as equally important.
It is our pleasant obligation to express our thanks to all
contributors, many of whom went far out of their way to help
bringing this volume together. We owe particular thanks to Alessia
Bauer and Katharina Simon, who stepped into the breach when we
suddenly found ourselves without an author for a structurally
important section of this book. Terry Gunnell pointed us to the
topicality of Snæfellsjökull in Icelandic newsprint, thus providing
us with the idea for the postscript that concludes this volume. One
of the editors (Matthias Egeler) owes thanks to the
Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Heisenberg Programme of the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which funded a substantial part of
the editorial and copyediting work as well as covering the printing
costs, and the Institut für Nordische Philologie of the Ludwig-
Maximilians-University in Munich for hosting him. For support
14

with copyediting, we would like to thank Sophie Fendel; for

language-checking the volume we are grateful to John Henry
Levin; and last but not least, we would like to thank Wilhelm
Heizmann for accepting the volume for the series of the Münchner
Nordistische Studien.

Munich and Tübingen,

December 2019

The Editors

Bibliography
Macfarlane, Robert 2008 (2003): Mountains of the Mind. A History of a
Fascination, London.
Schama, Simon 1996: Landscape and Memory, New York.
Tilley, Christopher 1994: A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places, Paths and
Monuments, Oxford/Providence, RI.
Westphal, Bertrand 2011: Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces, translated and
introduced by Robert T. Tally Jr, New York.
Westphal, Bertrand 2007: La géocritique: réel, fiction, espace, Paris.
Introduction
Fig. on previous page: the sheet covering Snæfellsjökull of the maps of the Danish
General Staff, published in Copenhagen in 1911. Reproduced with permission
from Jökull Sævarsson, Landbókasafn Íslands.
 17

Geocriticism, Place, and Landscape:

Theoretical Perspectives on Space, Meaning, and
Memory
Matthias Egeler

Geocriticism

Mount Kilimanjaro, the Matterhorn, Mount Everest – or, in the

North (in fact, as the only mountain in the North), Snæfellsjökull
capped by its glacier: there are mountains which are swathed in
stories and associations like others are swathed in clouds, exerting a
deep fascination on virtually any observer approaching them with a
Western cultural baggage. It is not just mountains, however, that
can gain such a looming presence in the mind of the observer.
Rome, Athens, Paris – cities as well can become correlated with
such a rich, dense web of associations that every mentioning of
their name conjures up a broad range of images, images which can
so much dominate the mental concept we have of these places that
they by far eclipse the functioning of their names as designators of a
geographical location, as a shorthand for degrees of longitude and
latitude. This transformation of certain spaces from a geographical
location to a mental presence almost detached from its whereabouts
in physical space – who has never heard of Mount Kilimanjaro?
Yet who can stick a needle into a map of Africa and confidently get
within 500 miles of it? – can affect even whole regions; if one
drops the word ›Provence‹, many more people will think of
undulating landscapes covered in fields of lavender, of the Occitan
language, of troubadours, of vineyards, or of the bold colours and
swirling shapes of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings than will be able to
draw the borders of this region of south-eastern France. A space
can be charged with mental images of such intensity that its
18

character as a geographical location can no longer keep up with its

cultural significance, and, transcending its existence as a point on a
grid of coordinates, it becomes a place of the mind.
The paradigm of geocriticism that this book refers to in its
subtitle is an attempt at coming to grips with this phenomenon.
Geocriticism, as defined by the French literary critic Bertrand
Westphal in his La géocritique,1 is an approach to space and
literature, and especially to the relationship between real and
fictional spaces, which is fundamentally characterised by the tenet
of geocentrism. This tenet is at the heart of a paradigm shift that
turns away from studying a particular text or the œuvre of a
particular author and instead proposes to study the literary
treatments of a particular place: instead of studying one individual’s
treatment of a particular location, the critic collects the manifold
different works that, in the course of time, have turned their
attention to a specific place and express a plethora of sometimes
similar, sometimes very different views, perspectives, claims, and
perceptions voiced about this location. Thus, a geocritical approach
does not study James Joyce’s Ulysses, but rather it studies the
appearance of Dublin in literature from the town’s founding by
Norse settlers and its appearance in the medieval Irish Cogadh
Gaedhel re Gallaibh all the way to contemporary novels, travel
writing, and journalism. Of course this raises practical problems of
feasibility: Dublin just plays too large a role in literature and the
arts for a single individual to be able to cover every treatment of
Dublin within a single book project, or even a single lifespan. Thus,
in practice, every geocritical project will have to restrict itself to
covering not everything, but merely as much ground as possible,

1 First published in 2007 as La géocritique; for an English translation cf.

Westphal 2011. Further on the paradigm cf. Tally (ed.) 2011; Tally 2013, pp. 112–
145; Tally 2014.
 19

limiting itself to selected representative examples. Even such a

selection of examples, however, will be able to bring together vastly
different perspectives on the place under scrutiny: the London of
Charles Dickens is an entirely different place from the London of
Arthur Conan Doyle; the India of the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana is worlds apart from the India of Rudyard Kipling; the
Oxford of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy has very little
indeed to do with the Oxford of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse
series. An investigation restricted to any one single author or text
would just pick one among many competing views of a place,
presenting an image that reflects a single, very particular
perspective on and perception of this place, and in doing so it
would necessarily widely fall short of drawing a representative
picture of the position of this place within the wider literary (and,
more broadly speaking, cultural) discourse. In contrast to this, a
selection of different perspectives, as long as it strives to be
representative, can provide us with a multi-faceted view of a place
unreachable through a classic text-focused or author-focused
approach, a view which both reveals the fluidity of the
conceptualisation of a place through time and the competing
interpretations it is given at any one time. For Bertrand Westphal,
to strive for such a multi-faceted, heterogeneous perspective on a
place has fundamental importance: as part of a postmodern,
counterhegemonic programme, he celebrates the heterogeneity of
how places are viewed, the plurality of the possible (and actual)
perceptions of space. For Jules Verne, Snæfellsjökull, as the gate to
the centre of the earth, is the starting point of an epic quest, and
this may be the view of this mountain which had the widest reach: a
place of allure, of promise, of adventure – for those, at least, who
can draw on the resources necessary to enjoy it. The graffiti found
20

in the cave Sönghellir on the slope of the mountain, in contrast,

speak a strikingly different language: there, repetitions and
repetitions of crosses and Christograms express a desperate prayer
for deliverance, speaking of fear and hardship and documenting a
view of Snæfellsjökull as a ›mountain of the mind‹2 which really was
a mountain of terror, a view as it was seen by those whom very
different economic and geographical circumstances of everyday life
forced to engage with it much more closely than they would ever
have wished – a perspective of labour, contrasting fundamentally
with Verne’s perspective of leisure and recreation.
Contrasting the perspective represented by Jules Verne, far
removed from Iceland geographically, economically, and socially as
it may be, with the much more immediate experience documented
by the Sönghellir graffiti, is, however, not meant to imply that the
one would be any more ›real‹ than the other. Rightly, Westphal
never tires to emphasise the close interconnectedness between
reality and fiction, between the referent and the representation.
Literature – and, more broadly, any kind of narrative about and
mental conceptualisation of places – refers to places, is based on
them, uses them as settings and agents; yet the connection goes in
both directions. Just as narratives are shaped by the places they
engage with, also our perception of the reality of a place is shaped
by the narratives connected with it. Today, virtually nobody visiting
the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris will be able to view the
Gothic building without, on some level, being aware of the figure of
Quasimodo from Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame and
without having their appreciation of the building coloured by this
awareness. Similarly, hardly a modern visitor to Snæfellsnes will be
unaware of Jules Verne’s conceptualisation of Snæfellsjökull as the
entrance to the centre of the earth – be it through the original

2 For this term cf. Macfarlane 2008.

 21

novel, through one of its cinematisations, or through the virtually

universal convention of Iceland guidebooks to point out that this
mountain is the setting of Jules Verne’s book. Being aware of this
association, virtually none of these visitors will be able to view
Snæfellsjökull as a mere accumulation of rock and ice; rather, their
experience of the mountain will always to some degree be coloured
by Verne, and subjectively, this experience with its literary
colouring will be nothing less real than the fears that inspired the
cross carvings of Sönghellir – even if the former is mediated
through a fictional narrative, while the latter were (at least partly)
grounded in the very real physical dangers of the mountain. Verne
and his reception have created a (mental) reality. Or in the words of
Westphal himself: »The description of a place does not reproduce a
referent; it is discourse that establishes the space.«3 And in this
establishing of space, ›trivial‹ and popular media should never be
underestimated: a geocritical, geocentred approach puts particular
places, spaces, and localities into the focus of attention, and when
studying the experience and cultural conceptualisations of place and
space it should never be forgotten that even concepts from ›high‹
literature only rarely make an impact on broader parts of
contemporary (or past) culture(s) in any direct fashion. Both
Quasimodo and the story of the Voyage au centre de la Terre may be
known to broad strata of Western society, but not because it is
common to read Hugo’s or Verne’s books, but because both
narratives are reproduced over and over again in a wide range of
popular (mass-)media, from film to guidebooks. Thus, a geocritical
approach, which first and foremost is interested in the literary and
cultural conceptualisation of a place (not: in a specific text or corpus
of texts about a place), cannot avoid engaging with such popular
medialisations. Only if all narrative – and even more broadly, all

3 Westphal 2011, p. 80.

22

cultural – engagements with a place are fully taken into

consideration, does it become possible to approach an
understanding of how a place is conceptualised and of how the
place and its representations are interactive and interdependent in a
dialectical process.
Such an approach, which puts the spatial referent rather than an
author or a literary work at the centre of its attention, needs a
methodology of its own. For such a dedicated methodology,
Westphal proposes four cornerstones: multifocalisation,
polysensoriality, a stratigraphic vision, and an engagement with
intertextuality. Of these, multifocalisation is a direct consequence of
the geocentred character of the enquiry, and a point that has already
been touched upon: by putting a place into the centre of attention, it
becomes impossible to focus on just one single representation of
this place in the work of a single author. An investigation restricted
to a single author or text would necessarily be limited in its scope to
the reconstruction of this author’s (or text’s) view of the place under
scrutiny; thus, the picture gained from such an investigation would
be biased and one-sided, reflecting nothing more than one single
perception of a place. The result of such an enquiry might be
appealingly unified, but this unity would be a unity based on
omission rather than synthesis, ignoring alternative
conceptualisations of the place and conceding an interpretative
monopoly to what merely is one perspective among many. By being
multifocal, however, a geocentred approach strives to avoid such
one-sidedness: drawing on as broad and heterogeneous a variety of
representations of a place as possible, from learned medieval
literature to modern tourist brochures, and even landscape
paintings and television series, the geocentred investigation pursues
the aim of engaging with the whole range of conceptualisations of a
place that are attested in our sources. Practical considerations will
almost always mean that this ideal can only be fulfilled in part, since
most places of any prominence are the object of too complex a
narrative culture to be able to deal with every single text that
engages with them. Yet a geocritical exploration still is under the
 23

obligation to be as multifocal as possible, and in doing so it will gain

a highly complex picture of a place.
This picture, most likely, will be characterised by a far-reaching
polysensoriality: it will go beyond the merely intellectual, engaging
the observer with the sensual perceptions that characterise the place
and that have entered into the dialectics between narrative and
›reality‹ from which our past and current cultural conceptualisations
of a place have arisen. (Here, for instance, belongs the cold that
preserves the mysterious salmon in Kristnihald undir Jökli and that
creates the very real danger of hypothermia that made a place like
Sönghellir so important as a refuge and thus, indirectly, led to the
creation of the cross carvings that form a central testimony to a
specific local view of the mountain.)
The complex picture that will arise from analysing a broad
selection of engagements with a place will also be characterised by a
strong stratigraphy: over time, one layer of interpretation is added
to another, forming strata of memories, meanings, and dreams that
throw a place into an ever-changing relief. (Landnámabók speaks of
one period’s engagement with Snæfellsjökull, Bárðar saga speaks
about that of another, twentieth-century landscape paintings speak
of a third, and modern guidebooks speak of a different one again.)
Only by pursuing place through time will we be able to
approximate a holistic understanding of what this place could mean
and has meant, and of the stratigraphy of these various meanings.
By engaging with this stratigraphy of meanings and
interpretations, we are very likely indeed to find that many of them
are characterised by a far-reaching intertextuality. Bárðar saga draws
(and in doing so, comments) on Landnámabók; Kristnihald undir
Jökli in turn draws on Bárðar saga and adds its own layer of
commentary; Guðný Halldórsdóttir’s cinematisation of Kristnihald
undir Jökli (1989) adds another layer; and modern guidebooks
generally draw on and offer interpretations of at least two of these
four narratives about Snæfellsjökull and in doing so create yet
another story again. The narrative culture connected with the place
does not consist of texts (and stories told in other media) which in
24

any sense can be considered as independent entities. Rather, the

various engagements with Snæfellsjökull have to be appreciated as a
densely interconnected network of engagements with a single place
– a network whose elements, in spite of being aware of each other,
may chose very different ways of approaching the place at its
centre, and which, thus, only a strictly multifocal approach may
hope to comprehend.

Space and Place

Bertrand Westphal has not developed his geocriticism ex nihilo, but

his approach to place is merely one, if an important, aspect of a
broader engagement with ›space‹ and ›place‹ in current scholarly
theorising. This current theoretical discourse on space has
developed predominantly in the last fifty years or so. A central
landmark in this development has been the work of Michel
Foucault. In the late 1960s, roughly at the same time when Laxness
was completing Kristnihald undir Jökli, Foucault diagnosed that a
focus on ›history‹ had been an interest – he even terms it an
›obsession‹ – characteristic of the nineteenth-century discourse; his
own present, in contrast, he described as fundamentally an ›epoch
of space‹,4 and in doing so he himself became a watershed in the
development of the discussion about space and spatiality.5 This
discourse, which was to evolve in the following decades, soon was
characterised by a marked plurality of approaches and
terminologies; there are, however, clear overall tendencies. Thus,
and most importantly in the present context, there was a strong and
continuing interest in the establishment of ›meaning‹ through the

4 Foucault 2006, p. 317.

5 For an overview cf. Cresswell 2015; Tally 2013.
 25

social construction of spaces and places: how do places come to

›mean‹ something, becoming imbued with a significance beyond
their own being? What role does such ›meaning‹ play in human life?
What contribution does it make to providing orientation? This
discussion was led on various levels and with recourse to a broad
variety of spaces and places, both intimate and public. Important
early work was done not least on the former, the intimate spaces of
human life. Gaston Bachelard, writing a decade before Foucault,
focused on the spaces of the house, exploring how the imagination
takes possession of the house’s nooks and corners and turns its
space into something filled with a deep significance, something
beloved and protective, and – most importantly – something which
takes on a quality fundamentally different from the ›neutral‹ spaces
as they are measured by the surveyor.6 Here, a distinction is
established which arguably was to be the single most important idea
of the spatial discourse: the distinction between space imbued with
significance and space without any such distinctive qualities,
between ›meaningful‹ space and the neutral physical space that can
be measured and surveyed but which does not point beyond itself
and which is not marked out as in any way ›special‹, which has no
›meaning‹. This distinction between ›meaningful‹ and ›meaningless‹
space has been applied to the whole range of spatial concepts from
the most private and intimate to the most public, including spaces
relevant for society as a whole. Thus, to quote just one example of
spatial thinking which lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from
Bachelard’s focus on the most intimate spaces of life, the theorist of
religions Jürgen Mohn has recently proposed to analyse religion
with a focus on the relationship between religion and space: he
argues that one of the most central ways in which human beings are
provided with orientation are the ›sacred‹ spaces established by

6 Bachelard 1994, esp. p. xxxvi.

26

religion. Such spaces, Mohn proposes, structure human space and

thus provide guidance on how to live one’s life and on how to find
meaning in it.7 In such an analysis, the relationship between ›space‹
and ›meaning‹ is discussed with reference to the most public arena
possible.
The distinction between ›meaningful‹ and ›meaningless‹ or
neutral space is fundamental to most past and current theorising on
spatiality, and it is also reflected in terminology. Terminologically,
there is a strong tendency to reflect the distinction between
›meaningful‹ and ›meaningless‹ space in a particular usage of the
terms ›space‹ and ›place‹. In the most common usage, ›space‹ is used
of neutral, ›meaningless‹ space, the space that Gaston Bachelard
refers to as the space of the surveyor: ›space‹, in this usage, is the
spatial raw material that can be measured in yards and cubic metres,
but which, other than providing room for doing something in (or
with), has no intrinsic significance. This ›space‹ is then contrasted
with ›place‹: ›place‹, as opposed to ›space‹, is construed as charged
with significance; ›place‹ is what ›space‹ is turned into when it is
imbued with meaning. Or to phrase the distinction between ›space‹
and ›place‹ the other way around: ›space‹ is the stuff from which
›place‹ is created when it is made meaningful. Where, as it is the
case in the works of most relevant authors, ›space‹ and ›place‹ are
conceptualised in this way, they form the most fundamental pair of
critical terms of the whole discourse on spatiality.8

7 Mohn 2007, critically building on Michel Foucault and Mircea Eliade

(cf. Eliade 1998).
8 For instance, Cresswell 2015; Tilley 1994; Smith 1987; Tuan 1977. For
the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that this usage of ›space‹ vs.
›place‹ is not universal; Henri Lefebvre, for instance, conceptualises what is
roughly the same distinction as a distinction between ›absolute space‹ and ›social
space‹: Cresswell 2015, pp. 18–19; Lefebvre 1991. Overall, however, such
alternative terminological conceptualisations are the exception rather than the rule.
 27

If one aims to engage with human, culturally constructed

meaning within a spatial context, then ›place‹ is a core term of the
debate; it has even been argued to be the key term for research in
the arts and humanities in the twenty-first century.9 Place, being
what space is turned into after it has been imbued with significance,
is »a meaningful location«, »a way of seeking, knowing, and
understanding the world«.10 A place is what stands out from space,
what is marked in contrast to the amorphous unmarked. By
standing out, place attracts and focusses attention; Jonathan Z.
Smith once used this property of place as the basis of a whole
definition of the ›sacred‹: for him, sacred places are defined by their
function, which he sees in a focusing, a heightening of attention,
and this heightening and focusing of attention, for Smith, is what
differentiates something sacred from something profane. As a
consequence, Smith suggests that »[a] sacred text is one that is used
in a sacred place – nothing more is required. [...] The sacra are
sacred solely because they are used in a sacred place; there is no
inherent difference between a sacred vessel and an ordinary one«.11
This standing-out of place, a trait fundamental enough to even
suggest theories of the sacred, also means that a place is nothing to
be passed without taking notice. Place stands out of space, and as
such it captivates attention, provoking deeper contemplation, a
pause, a stop. In this vein, Yi-Fu Tuan, one of the classic theorists
of place, suggests:
What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as
we get to know it better and endow it with value [...]. The
ideas ›space‹ and ›place‹ require each other for definition.
From the security and stability of place we are aware of

9 Cresswell 2015, p. 1.
10 Quotations: Cresswell 2015, pp. 12, 18.
11 Smith 1987, pp. 104, 106.
28

the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa.

Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows
movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement
makes it possible for location to be transformed into
place.12

This aspect of place, as its significance more generally, is not merely

an individual, subjective one, but is created within a social context:
we learn that a place is worth pausing for, and this process of
learning takes place in, and is largely defined by, a social and
cultural context. Here, power relations play a central role, and Tim
Cresswell is right to define place as »space invested with meaning
in the context of power«:13 somebody, at some point, has decided
that a space becomes a place worth stopping for – even the sacrality
of the Temple in Jerusalem had not arisen ›naturally‹, but simply
was established by royal decree and thus purely the consequence of
an act of social power.14 Places are not always places, but are,
socially, made into places – we will see later on in this volume that
also Snæfellsjökull was not always a ›place‹, but for a long time
seems to have been simply a ›space‹ which (quite exactly in the
sense in which the term is used in the theoretical discourse) was a
mere blank in the centre of the tip of its peninsula: in some of the

12 Tuan 1977, p. 6. Cf. Cresswell 2015, p. 15.

13 Cresswell 2015, p. 19. Cf. Smith 1987, p. 45: »place is not best conceived
as a particular location with an idiosyncratic physiognomy or as a uniquely
individualistic node of sentiment, but rather as a social position within a
hierarchical system. What we are concerned with is the connotation of place that
always accompanies its use as a verb in English and is revealed in phrases such as
keep your place. It is a sense that has been overshadowed, in English, by a more civic
understanding of place (as in its cognate, piazza), but which is embedded in some
forms of Indo-European usage.«
14 Smith 1987, pp. 83–84.
 29

earliest literature, it is present only through its striking absence

even in passages where one would expect it to be mentioned.
Another line of associations suggested by Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept
of place as pause is stopping for viewing. If we stop for a place, this
may be because we are purely travelling in the mind, as a reader in
an armchair or pondering memories, and pause at the mentioning
of a name; but it may also be that we are approaching a place
physically and, as it comes into view, pause to take it in. This brings
us to the critical term to which the next section of this theoretical
introduction will be dedicated: the term ›landscape‹.

Landscape

The word ›landscape‹, in English, is both a term going back to the

Old English period and an early modern loanword. Already in Old
English, there was a word landscipe; but the modern term
›landscape‹ is based not so much on this native predecessor but
rather on the Dutch term landschap, which in the late sixteenth
century entered the English language as a technical term of painting
together with Dutch (landscape) paintings.15 These art historical
roots are the reason for why English ›landscape‹ even at the turn of
the last century still primarily referred to an artistic representation
of an inland scenery; a landscape, first and foremost, was a picture
of a view, and only then it referred to this view itself, as it could be
seen from a particular point, and (even further down the line) to the
tract of land perceived in such a view.16 A ›landscape‹, thus, in the
(historical) first instance is a painted landscape. For the history of

15 OED, s.v. ›landscape, n.‹; Schama 1996, p. 10. On the largely parallel
history of the German term ›Landschaft‹ cf. Schenk 2001, §1.
16 OED, s.v. ›landscape, n.‹, meanings 1a, 2a, and 2b respectively.
30

Fig. 1: W.G. Collingwood (1897/99): »Snæfell from Reykjavík, seen across

Faxaflói«, Collingwood/Jón Stefánsson 1899, p. 8, fig. 6.

Snæfellsjökull as a mountain of the mind, this is not without

relevance; after all, Snæfellsjökull has always been a favoured
subject of Icelandic landscape painting both native and foreign. W.
G. Collingwood (Fig. 1) and Kjarval are perhaps the most
prominent, but they certainly are not the only artists who took their
pens and brushes to the mountain.17

17 Following a journey to Iceland undertaken in 1897, W.G. Collingwood

published a number of watercolours and drawings of Snæfellsjökull and its
surroundings in his Pilgrimage to the Saga-Steads of Iceland (1899). Paintings,
drawings, and sketches of Snæfellsjökull, and Snæfellsnes landscapes more
generally, by Kjarval and other artists (Thorvald Molander, Jakob Hafstein) in the
Reykjavík Art Museum (Listasafn Reykjavíkur) are represented by the catalogue
 31

›Landscape‹ in the sense of ›landscape painting‹ per se has,

outside of art history proper, few applications as an analytical
concept. Recalling the artistic roots of the term, however, is a
helpful reminder that, even though in present-day colloquial usage
›landscape‹ frequently is used to refer to a ›natural‹ scenery,
originally there is little about ›landscape‹ that is ›natural‹. In some
periods, the artistic-artificial character of ›landscape‹ has gone to
lengths which today might seem to border on the grotesque. Here,
one may, for instance, recall the Claude Glass. The Claude Glass
was a contraption that had its heyday in the England of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Essentially, it consisted
in a slightly convex, tinted mirror contained in a box, which was
used to view a landscape located behind the back of the viewer. The
Claude Glass reduced this landscape in scale, highlighted its
prominent features through a loss of detail, and tinted the image in
a way which had become fashionable through the works of the
seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain. Thus, the real
landscape – the landscape which the viewer was turning his or her
back to! – was converted into a hand-held representation ›executed‹
in a style that had become established for landscape paintings.
Contemporary enthusiasts of the Claude Glass sometimes went to
considerable lengths to make most of its particular effect. During
his tour of the English Lake District in 1769, for instance, the poet
Thomas Grey was keen to fully appreciate the by then already
canonical landscape view from the ferry landing on the western
shore of Lake Windermere in the ›best‹ possible manner. During
the crossing to the famous landing place, therefore, he put on a
blindfold; then, after his arrival, he turned his back to the famous

numbers LR-1707, LR-0211, K-5282 , K-5123, K-0237, K-0610, K-2356, K-2368,

K-4502, K-4516, K-5003, K-5370, K-5442. (For this list, I owe thanks to Bryndís
Erla Hjálmarsdóttir.)
32

view and, before looking at it directly, viewed the landscape

through his Claude Glass. As Anna Pavord has remarked, it is
almost as if the view across Lake Windermere »did not properly
exist until it had been mediated«.18 In this process, the direct
perception of the landscape was transformed into an image that
approximated a landscape painting of a certain, culturally
predefined style.
›Landscape‹, thus, at its roots is not something natural, but
something that more than anything else is based on cultural
conventions, cultural techniques, and medialisation. Within the
scholarly discourse, however, the term soon emancipated itself from
its immediate connection with landscape painting and the purely
visual. An early example of this ›new‹, anthropological use of
›landscape‹ can be found in the work of Bronislaw Malinowski,
who spent the First World War marooned on the Trobriand
Islands in the southwestern Pacific Ocean and through this
experience was to become one of the founding fathers of modern
anthropological field research. His deep immersion into the culture
of the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands gave him important
insights into their engagement with their surrounding ›landscape‹;
as a consequence of these, Malinowski came to view it as one of his
tasks as an anthropologist
to reconstruct the influence of myth upon this vast
landscape, as it colours it, gives it meaning, and transforms
it into something live and familiar. What was a mere rock,
now becomes a personality; what was a speck on the
horizon becomes a beacon, hallowed by romantic
associations with heroes; a meaningless configuration of
landscape acquires a significance, obscure no doubt, but
full of intense emotion. Sailing with natives [...], I often

18 Pavord 2016, p. 16; cf. Schama 1996, pp. 11–12.

 33

observed how deep was their interest in sections of

landscape impregnated with legendary meaning, how the
elder ones would point and explain, the younger would
gaze and wonder, while the talk was full of mythological
names.19

These observations, made by a pioneer a century ago, already

encapsulate what still are fundamentals of modern landscape
theory. Learning to view ›landscape‹ through the eyes of the
Trobrianders rather than through a Claude Glass, Malinowski
recognised landscape as not just a scenery to be judged by aesthetic
criteria, but as a space filled with meaning – it should be noted that
the word ›meaning‹, both in its positive form and in its negation,
appears three times even in the short passage quoted here. While
there are similar definitional issues connected with the term
›landscape‹ as they are connected with ›space‹ and ›place‹,20 for most
of the landscape-theoretical discourse the connection between
›landscape‹ and ›meaning‹ still is probably the most fundamental
single element of what makes a ›landscape‹: a ›landscape‹, in the
words of Tim Robinson, is »not just the terrain but also the human
perspectives on it, the land plus its overburden of meanings«.21
Landscape is a scenery, or a tract of land, imbued with significance;
and here, at the latest, it becomes clear how closely interconnected
the term ›landscape‹, as a critical term, is with the term ›place‹. If
›landscape‹ is »the terrain [...] plus its overburden of meanings« and
›place‹ is »space invested with meaning«,22 then it is clear that both
›landscape‹ and ›place‹ are aspects of the same thing: of the
tendency of human beings to fill the world around them with

19 Malinowski 1922, p. 298.

20 Cf. Cresswell 2015, pp. 17–18.
21 Robinson 1996, p. 162.
22 Cresswell 2015, p. 19 (quoted above, p. 28).
34

meaning and significance. If one tries to differentiate the two

terms, the most helpful approach is to differentiate them by degrees
of scale: while the term ›place‹ is suggestive of a more or less
narrow geographical extent (a sacred site, for instance, a house, or
the peak of a mountain), a ›landscape‹ is (at least) the whole expanse
of terrain that an observer can take in from a certain viewpoint.
Such a vast expanse of land is likely not to be homogeneous. A wide
stretch of land will contain both places and the rather more un-
marked spaces in between them, giving it a rhythm and a pulse.
Thus, a landscape, like a place, is space filled with meaning. But in
the case of a place, the meaningful space is restricted and thus
reference is made to a specific, meaningful point, whereas a
landscape is a space that is not, at least not necessarily, filled with
meaning into its last nooks and crannies, but rather a space that
contains enough enclaves of meaning – enough ›places‹ – to be
conceivable as being meaningful overall. ›Place‹, understood in this
way, is ›meaning‹, while ›landscape‹ is the rhythm of the
(meaningful) ›places‹ and the (meaningless) ›spaces‹ in between
them.

Meaning and Memory

In the passage quoted above, Bronislaw Malinowski alludes to a

central mechanism for how both places and landscapes are filled
with ›meaning‹, mentioning »how the elder ones would point and
explain, the younger would gaze and wonder«: the meaning that
places and landscapes are imbued with is, at least in one of its
aspects, a function of communal memory, of a memory passed
down through the generations. In Malinowski’s example, an oral
culture, this passing-on of communal memories happens orally; but
of course this is not the only way how memory can be passed on. In
other cultural contexts, writing will play a central role for the
memory process; and other media as well can contribute to the
 35

propagation of communal memory. In the following chapters, we

will see time and again how memories wander through the
kaleidoscope of the available media (a process which, within the
paradigm of geocriticism, is part of what is taken into view by the
methodological tenet of intertextuality): on the slopes of
Snæfellsjökull, one can observe how memories of Bárður the God
of Snæfell migrate from Bárðar saga to Kristnihald undir Jökli to the
statue of Bárður Snæfellsáss at Arnarstapi to signposts for tourists
that have been put up in recent years; in this way, such memories
are passed on through generations, media, and social groups. Also
the physical formations of the landscape itself can play a core role in
this process (»[w]hat was a mere rock, now becomes a
personality«); the cave Sönghellir is an example for this, being both
a site of memories of Bárður in Bárðar saga and a place where these
memories are not only materialised in stone but also popularised by
multilingual information boards. And likewise, Malinowski’s
example of the »mere rock« turned into something vastly
transcending its materiality recalls the Bárðarskip in Dritvík Bay
south-west of Snæfellsjökull (Fig. 2): this ›Bárður’s Ship‹ is a
distinctive, vaguely ship-shaped rock formation that folklorically is
named from and identified with the ship in which Bárður reached
the peninsula according to chapter 4 of his saga.23 Here, memories
become manifest in the materiality of the landscape.
A central strategy for the inscription of such memories into the
landscape are names. Malinowski mentions that the talk he was
listening to among the Trobrianders »was full of mythological
names«, and to connect places with names is indeed a core tool for
ascribing meaning to them. Naming is fundamental for any further
narrative engagement with places: only named places can be talked
about with any ease and accuracy and become a yielding object of

23 Þórhallur Vilmundarson 1991, pp. LXXXVII–LXXXVIII, XC.

36

Fig. 2: Dritvík Bay with Bárðarskip in its centre. Photo by the author, 2014.

speech. In the words of Tim Robinson: »Placenames are the

interlock of landscape and language.«24 Placenames, thus, make
place accessible to story and by doing so turn it from a culturally
amorphous space into a ready receptacle of meaning and
significance: only by being named Bárðarskip (Bárður’s Ship) is the
rock in Dritvík Bay turned from a mere rock formation into a
landscape feature that immediately evokes memories of Bárður and
his deeds and thus becomes part of Icelandic storytelling and, by
implication, of the human social and cultural world. As Christopher
Tilley puts it: »Place names [...] transform the sheerly physical and

24 Robinson 1996, p. 155; cf. p. 163: »The act of naming, or of learning its
name, strikes a place like lightning, magnetizing it, attracting observations and the
accumulation of placelore.«
 37

geographical into something that is historically and socially

experienced.«25 Since in this way a placename is a central ›carrier‹ of
meaning, however, one wonders whether there might also be a
correlation between specific types of names and the degree and ease
with which the thus-named places are associated with stories?
Might here be a reason why Snæfellsjökull with its rather blandly-
descriptive name ›Snow-Mountain’s-Glacier‹ appears (as it will be
discussed in the following chapter) to have become a focus of
storytelling only at a comparatively late point in time, much later
than its geographical prominence might have led one to expect?
Meaning is imbued into spaces, turning them into places and
landscapes, by placenames and narratives that serve to fix memories
to particular locations. The ›memories‹ that lie at the heart of such
processes are, of course, not, at least not necessarily, factually
correct recollections of real happenings and circumstances. Viewed
with a modern scientific mindset, it seems rather unlikely that
Bárðarskip really ever was anyone’s ship, let alone Bárður’s, and that
there ever was anybody who would have been able to ›remember‹ it
being so in any literal sense of the word. Rather, the »work of the
mind«26 that is landscape is created from ›cultural memories‹, i.e.
from perceptions of the past as it is seen from the respective
presents, perceptions which are continually in a state of flux, being
adapted to the needs of each period and of its social discourses.27 By
implication, also a ›landscape‹ changes. Landscape is a cultural
construct whose perception is crucially dependent on the cultural
framework that tells the observer how to interpret its physical
forms. As Robert Macfarlane puts it: »We read landscapes, [...], we

25 Tilley 1994, p. 18; cf. Basso 1996 for a detailed ethnographic study of
contemporary social uses of placenames.
26 Schama 1996, p. 7.
27 In general on the term ›cultural memory‹ cf. Assmann 1992; Hermann
2009.
38

interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and

memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.«28 Thus, even
when a landscape remains physically unchanged, its perception
changes in unison with the changes in the cultural memory of its
viewers. The Snæfellsjökull area seen by the author of Bárðar saga
might have been physically the same stretch of land, but it was not
at all the same landscape as the Snæfellsjökull area seen by Halldór
Laxnes, Collingwood, Kjarval, or modern tourists.

Concluding Remarks

Places (like Snæfellsjökull) and landscapes (like the tip of

Snæfellsnes which is dominated by this mountain) are, first and
foremost, cultural constructs. As such, they are topographical
embodiments (em-place-ments?) of the societies that have engaged
with them, and just as these societies, they are prone to undergo
far-reaching changes over time. What a place is and what a
landscape is, depends not only on the ›where‹, but centrally also on
the ›when‹ and the ›who‹ of the observer: places and landscapes
cannot be thought of as static, or as entities separate from the
people that encounter them. By bringing together images of
Snæfellsjökull from different periods and in different media, it is
one of the central aims of the present volume to create a picture of
this constant change in which both innovations and how these
innovations are tied back to (a sometimes long-established)
tradition become visible. At the same time, the intrinsic
entanglement between place, cultural memory, and society also
makes clear where the wider significance of such a study lies: by

28 Macfarlane 2008, p. 18.

 39

being a cultural construct, a place is not so much an isolated entity

that only speaks of itself, but rather it is a reflex of the society that
has created it. Thus, a history of the perception of Snæfellsjökull
can act as the microcosm on which to study the macrocosm of
Iceland as a whole, as it is mirrored in the cosmos of meanings that
in different periods and contexts became attached to this mountain.

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