The Icelandic mythscape: sagas, landscapes and national identity

When Icelandic intellectuals studying in Copenhagen encountered Romantic conceptions of landscape and literature in the early 1800s, they began redefining their ideas on Icelandicness and the value of their island's ` abnormal' landscape. The medieval sagas and Eddas were increasingly spatialised and woven into the fabric of a constructed national landscape. The cultural cultivation of Iceland's most prolific site of memory (Pingvellir) by poets like Jonas Hallgrimsson is scrutinised in the context of the island's ` national awakening'. Using Elias Canetti's concept of the crowd symbol, this article will demonstrate the entanglement of philology, landscape and the construction of Iceland's national identity.