Landscape of Desire: Partial Stories of the Medieval Scandinavian World

An exhilarating journey across a distant literary landscape, this book takes us to those places described, evoked, or invented in Beowulf and the sagas of Iceland. Chronicling their own travels in Scandinavia, charting the geography of medieval history and fiction, the authors negotiate the complex territory where past and present meet. In this encounter, ancient and modern viewpoints converge, forming a new way into the northern world of medieval literature.

Overing and Osborn use a variety of approaches, borrow from different disciplines, and employ an array of styles to discover and "reinvent" the landscape of these texts. Through their scholarly appraisals and personal encounters, maps and photographs, we accompany them as they follow Beowulf's sea route and travel to Drangey, the remote island in the Saga of Grettir. Here and at numerous other legendary sites, we see how the past is made up of divergent stories told in the present, and how our own histories and desires influence the shape and purpose of those stories.

These experiences and places, imagined and real, frame a new and essentially interdisciplinary space where a conversation among different professional, personal, and cultural viewpoints--a conversation that engages individual desire--can take place. This book will appeal to medievalists, historians, cultural geographers, critical theorists, and those who like to travel, whether in literature or their own good time.

Contents

Introduction

1. Mapping Beowulf

Reinventing Beowulf's voyage to Denmark

Traveling home with Beowulf

2. Geography in the Reader

Place in Question

Iceland and Icelanders

Places in Question

Selves in Place

Places in Translation and the Metonymy of Terrain

3. The Saga of the Saga

The Road to Drangey

Where's Grettir?