Islands in the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination

Islands in the West: Classical Myth and the Medieval Norse and Irish Geographical Imagination

Author
Matthias Egeler
Publisher
Brepols
Language
English
Year
2017
Page
370
ISBN
2503569382,9782503569383,9782503569390
File Type
pdf
File Size
3.0 MiB

This monograph traces the history of one of the most prominent types of geographical myths of the North-West Atlantic Ocean: transmarine otherworlds of blessedness and immortality. Taking the mythologization of the Viking Age discovery of North America in the earliest extant account of Vínland ('Wine-Land') and the Norse transmarine otherworlds of Hvítramannaland ('The Land of White Men') and the Ódáinsakr/Glæsisvellir ('Field of the Not-Dead'/'Shining Fields') as its starting point, the book explores the historical entanglements of these imaginative places in a wider European context. It follows how these Norse otherworld myths adopt, adapt, and transform concepts from early Irish vernacular tradition and Medieval Latin geographical literature, and pursues their connection to the geographical mythology of classical antiquity. In doing so, it shows how myths as far distant in time and space as Homer's Elysian Plain and the transmarine otherworlds of the Norse are connected by a continuous history of creative processes of adaptation and reinterpretation. Furthermore, viewing this material as a whole, the question arises as to whether the Norse mythologization of the North Atlantic might not only have accompanied the Norse westward expansion that led to the discovery of North America, but might even have been among the factors that induced it.

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