Environmental Memory and Change in Medieval Iceland, August 2014 – Part 1 (The Academic Bit).

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So this is the post where I finally explain what on earth I was doing for two weeks in a remote valley in Northern Iceland! (Apart from making friends with sheep).

Well, this summer I was lucky enough to get a place on a very unique style of interdisciplinary graduate course in Iceland, run by the Svartarkot Culture-Nature program, which is managed by the Reykjavik Academy. The course was sponsored by:

The Eco-Humanities Hub of Mid Sweden University

NABO (The North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation),

NIES (The Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies)

and GHEA (The Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance).

(A lot of acronyms, but if you’re interested you should check out the links – the organisations are actively looking for new members and connections).

The link here will take you to a page detailing the lecturers and researchers involved in the course.

Truthfully, there was so much to this course that I’m not sure I could more than scratch the surface here, but I’ll give a few of my thoughts.

A Crash Course in Environmental Humanities

The course was centred around the emerging field of Environmental Humanities, which was completely new to me. The people involved certainly reflected the interdisciplinary nature of the project, including literary scholars, archaeologists, ecocritics, geographers, biologists and anthropologists (and a good few who span a coouple of these categories!). In a time when ‘interdisciplinarity’ seems to be a buzzword it was really fascinating to be involved in a project where the meeting of disciplines was more than an ideal or an afterthought. As a graduate student, sometimes you can get so caught up with trying to be an expert on your thesis that you get very comfortable in your little niche. A course like this is an intellectual challenge. You have to work together with people who come from very different backgrounds, both academically and geographically, and find a way of communicating between disciplinary discourses and methodologies.

Something that really interested me about this whole project was how the organisers acknowledged the challenges of a collaborative project.  They argued that the research agenda of such a project should be defined at the point where disciplines overlap – relevant research questions should be co-formulated, rather than one discipline being an add-on to another. Disciplinary expertise exists outside of this, and has its own autonomy, but feeds in to answering the research questions.  Thus true interdisciplinarity may be collaboration: co-designing and co-executing a research agenda.

The Icelandic Sagas in Iceland

While at the start of the course I was unfamiliar with the concepts of ecocriticism and environmental humanities, I was pretty familiar with the medieval literature of the sagas.  What this course offered, however, was a very different way of looking at literature.  The course focused on investigating the links between landscape and literature, between cultural record and environmental memory.  There are so many levels to grapple with in looking at landscape in the sagas: the textual representation of a landscape written by people several centuries later.   We in our present are looking at an ‘historical’ text that is itself looking back at a historical past.

Something that I had not considered as much previously, was the importance of extra-textual traditions of remembrance and how they connect to the environment – place names, local stories and traditions.  It’s almost as if there are two afterlives of the saga texts, one the academic discourse, the other a local tradition.  To be in Iceland, looking at landscape sites mentioned in the sagas, hearing local stories and traditions about them, adds another, almost visceral, dimension to one’s engagement with the sagas.  You realise that they not only form part of a past but are keenly involved in the present.

To be quite frank, I did wonder at the start of the course how on earth a medieval text could be used to inform modern environmental research.  I was surprised.  By connecting information in the sagas about weather, climate and farming practices in the landscape to archaeological and scientific research, the scholars involved in projects run by the organisations mentioned above are able to learn a lot more about changes in regional climate and the impact of various human practices.

One of the most interesting lectures that stimulated many thoughts about my own research, was that by Emily Lethbridge, a Research Fellow at the University of Iceland.  Emily spent a year touring the sites of the sagas (by herself, in a van, which was enough to impress me to be honest!) and recording the difference that this kind of first-hand experience of the Icelandic landscape made to her understanding of the saga texts and how they are remembered within that landscape. She is compiling a book on her journeys but here is a link to her blog: http://sagasteads.blogspot.co.uk/

Another of my favourite things about the course was the importance of excursions and hiking! For someone trained as a literary scholar, getting out and about in the landscape, having academic (oh, alright, and some not-so-academic!) discussions out of doors was an invigorating experience.  The world of the sagas stopped being just about words on a page, as fond of those words as I am, and became a ‘lived’ world, a world of people and nature and stories, and so many more ways of remembering than I had thought.

 

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