Matthias Egeler

Landscape, Religion, and the Supernatural presents a summa of current and classic theorizing on religion and the supernatural in relationship to the land and develops this theorizing further by confronting it with a rich set of folkloristic and historical data. Focusing on the themes of “time and memory,” “repeating patterns,” “identity formation,” “morality,” “labor,” “playfulness and adventure,” “power and subversion,” “sound,” “emotions,” “coping with contingency,” “home and unhomeliness,” and “nature and environment,” the book engages with a broad range of theoretical concepts and approaches from the interdisciplinary field of landscape theory and the study of religions. It brings this theorizing into dialogue with the rich culture of local storytelling and landscape-related traditional beliefs of the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords. In this rural region, landscape-related traditions have been collected since the early nineteenth century and continue to be important to this day. Confronting this rich heritage with the insights of landscape theory both in and beyond the study of religions allows important new contributions to theorizing landscape and religion, especially when it comes to considering the perspectives on landscape held by rural populations rather than the urban upper classes that have stood in the focus of research to date. The example of the Icelandic Westfjords shows the extreme richness of religious and supernatural approaches to the landscape that can be developed in rural communities, and how they are significantly and characteristically different from the urban perspectives of literature and the arts.

https://www.chbeck.de/egeler-elfen-feen/product/36194848

Dieser Band bietet kompetent und unterhaltsam einen Überblick über Geschichte und Geschichten der Elfen und Feen von ihren Ursprüngen in keltischen und nordischen Mythen bis in die Welt der isländischen "Elfenbeauftragten" und von Harry Potter. Mal verstörende, mal zauberhafte Begegnungen mit Naturgeistern oder Gestalten wie etwa den Herrinnen von Avalon (Artussage), mit Elrond und Galadriel (Herr der Ringe), Titania und Oberon (Mittsommernachtstraum) oder auch Peter Pan verheißen Abenteuer und Lesevergnügen. Zugleich wird deutlich, wie jede Epoche ihre eigenen Feen und Elfen hervorgebracht hat – und in den sich wandelnden Vorstellungen vom Übernatürlichen erkennen wir die Ängste und Sehnsüchte der jeweiligen Zeiten bis in unsere Tage.

A translation of the Táin together with a selection of its foretales: De Chophur in dá Muccida, Compert Con Culainn, Aislinge Óenguso, Noínden Ulad, Scéla Mucce meic Dathó, Tochmarc Emire, Serglige Con Culainn, Aided Óenfir Aífe, Longes Mac nUislenn, Táin Bó Regamna, Echtra Nerai (my favourite), and Táin Bó Froích. For sale via the usual suspects (including Amazon). https://www.kroener-verlag.de/details/product/sagas-aus-dem-alten-irland/

The three Aran Islands in Galway Bay in the west of Ireland — Inis Mór, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr —have exerted a pull on Irish and British imagination unlike any other archipelago of their small size, with the exception perhaps of the Blasket Islands.
    A central part of the foundation myth of the Islands is the Life of their patron saint Éanna (or Éinne), commonly anglicised as Enda and Latinised as Endeus. A scion of noble lineage who would have lived during the early years of Christianity in Ireland, his arrival on the Aran Islands constituted a complete break with everything that went before (or so his Life claims). Tradition thus places him at the recorded beginning of one of Ireland’s most iconic places, but no translation of his medieval Latin Life had been published to date. The present book aims to close this gap, and is prefaced by an essay on Landscape and Labour in the Life.

https://uccshop.ie/.../the-life-of-saint-enda-abbot-of-aran/
https://www.amazon.de/Life-Saint-Enda-Abbot-Aran/dp/0995546940/ref=sr_1_9?__mk_de_DE=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&crid=3QHQUBSIWR0OL&keywords=egeler+aran&qid=1677450982&sprefix=egeler+aran%2Caps%2C132&sr=8-9

BOOK OF SETTLEMENTS. THE HAUKSBÓK RECENSION OF LANDNÁMABÓK. Translated by Matthias Egeler
Viking Society for Northern Research 2022. xxv + 174 pages. ISBN: 978-1-914070-02-0. Price £18 / £9.
Order from sales@gazellebooks.co.uk. State Viking Society membership to claim members’ reduced price (£9).
Landnámabók, thought to have been first compiled in the twelfth century, documents the settlement of Iceland through accounts of some 430 settlers, their families and descendants. It was copied repeatedly throughout the Middle Ages and later, and survives in several redactions that are extant in varying states of preservation. This new translation is based on the version made by Haukr Erlendsson in the early fourteenth century, never before translated into English. The translation and its introduction give special attention to the text’s sense of place, as conveyed in the place names bestowed on the land by the settlers and in the anecdotes told about them. The book is illustrated by numerous black and white photographs and includes an introduction, an index of primary settlers, and a table summarising the chapter sequence of the Hauksbók recension in comparison to that of Sturlubók.

Now open access at https://edition.fi/kalevalaseura/catalog/book/956.

Much of both Icelandic and medieval Irish literature is, in one way or another, storytelling about places, reflecting a deep engagement with the concept of ‘place’ and the creation of a ‘sense of place’. This book takes as its starting point the shared interest that Icelandic and Irish storytelling have in ‘place’ and asks whether the medieval Icelandic sense of place, as reflected in Icelandic narrative culture, has been influenced by the close contacts that existed during the Viking Age between Iceland and the Gaelic-speaking world of Ireland and Scotland. In attempting to answer this question, the book contributes to the long-standing debate about Gaelic influences in Icelandic culture, the much more recent discourse on the spatiality of medieval Icelandic literature and storytelling, and the cultural history of the Icelandic Settlement Period. Obliquely, the findings of the book may even shed light on the origins of Icelandic saga literature.
The books offers critical insights on a number of general points of spatial theory, as both the Gaelic and the Old Norse-Icelandic material can offer valuable contributions to the theoretical-systematic study of ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘home’. The focus of the monograph, however, lies on an in-depth study of material drawn primarily from toponymy and two especially place-focused medieval Icelandic texts: Landnámabók, the ‘Book of Settlements’, and Eyrbyggja saga, the ‘Saga of the Inhabitants of Eyr’.
The book’s first chapter (“Place, Naming Place, and Playing with Place”) starts out with presenting the reader with an introduction to fundamental aspects of current theorising on the concepts of ‘space’, ‘place’, and ‘home’. After this theoretical prelude, the discussion takes a more empirical turn, making a survey of Icelandic place-names that seem to have been directly transferred from Britain (esp. Scotland and the Scottish islands) and undertaking a comparison of three medieval Irish and three medieval Icelandic place-stories that highlights remarkable structural parallels in how stories are told about places in both the medieval Gaelic-speaking world and in early Iceland.
The second and main chapter of the book (“Narrating Place: a Survey of Place-Stories on the Move”) then undertakes an in-depth study of nine specific examples of Icelandic-Gaelic place-lore adaptations:
1. the water-horse story in Landnámabók H71/S83;
2. the account of Ørlygr Hrappsson’s settlement in Landnámabók H15;
3. the biographies of ‘Saint’ Ásólfr in Landnámabók S24 and H21;
4. the account of Auðr the Deep-Minded and the Krosshólar Hills in Landnámabók S97;
5. the accounts of papar in Landnámabók (S1/H1, S320/H280, S323=H283) and Íslendingabók (ch. 1), which can be shown to be purely pseudo-historical constructs playing on Gaelic approaches to the semantisation of space rather than relating any factual presence of Gaelic monks in pre-Settlement Iceland;
6. the early modern folklore of the Ódáinsakur in the Hvanndalur Valley and its possible Viking Age prehistory;
7. the accounts of houses of excessive hospitality in Landnámabók (S72/H60; S86/H74; S200=H168) and Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 8);
8. the story of Þórólfr Twist-Foot and his transformation into a splendid but violent bull in Eyrbyggja saga (especially chs 33–34, 63);
9. and the report of Hvítramannaland in Landnámabók (S122/H94).
All these narratives seem to be based on an adaptation of prominent and common Gaelic storytelling motifs as they are found in medieval Irish literature, esp. Irish hagiography and the heroic storytelling of the Ulster Cycle of Tales. With some important caveats, these nine examples aim to be an exhaustive survey of major Icelandic adaptations of Gaelic place-lore. The chapter also pays particular attention to the use of toponyms in such narratives and to the specific historical situation of the Icelandic settlement. In particular, this includes the strong emphasis on the narrative construction of ‘home’ that results from this historical situation and which in many ways is mirrored in the narratives under scrutiny: it seems that some early settlers made themselves at home in Iceland by inscribing Gaelic stories into their newly-taken land.
Chapter 3 (“Epiloge: Hoofprints and Sagas”), the book’s final chapter, focusses on patterns and cross-connections rather than on individual tales. It takes the material introduced in chapter 2 and analyses it laterally, highlighting themes that appear to recur and play dominant roles across this data set. Among the most notable of these recurrent themes is a strong impression that the way how Gaelic material is adapted in high medieval Icelandic place-storytelling seems to imply an element of a genuinely Settlement Period-tradition in thirteenth-century Icelandic literature: this literature seems to preserve much more early material than the author would have thought possible before the conclusion of the project presented by this book. Another recurrent theme is the importance of the Hebrides for the transmission of Gaelic place-lore to Iceland: more than half of the (it seems) clear cases of an Icelandic adaptation of Gaelic place-lore are explicitly connected with early Icelandic settlers that reached Iceland not directly from Scandinavia, but first emigrated to the Hebrides before finally moving on to Iceland. The Hebrides, it seems, acted as a central corridor for the transmission of Gaelic cultural elements to Iceland: for some early Icelandic settlers, the reference point for what ‘home’ should be like was not Scandinavia, but was the Gaelic landscape of the Scottish isles, and so after their arrival in Iceland they went on to turn the Icelandic landscape conceptually into a facsimile of the landscapes of the Gaelic world. This last point, furthermore, already plays into one of the two final important points to note: Gaelic-inspired Icelandic place-lore seems to show a marked emphasis on the Christian religious semantisation of the land as well as a pervasive focus on the creation of ‘home’.
Both of the latter points, of course, arise naturally from the overall historical situation of the Settlement Period: during this period, early Icelandic Christianity was first and foremost dependent on Irish and Scottish Christianity, and the settlement on a previously entirely empty island necessitated a concerted effort to establish a bond between the settlers and this new, empty land. Taking the implications of this emphasis on the creation of ‘home’ one step further, the third chapter – and the book – conclude by considering some recent and classical contributions to the discussion about the origins of Icelandic saga literature. Thus, the book closes with the question of whether the reception of Gaelic place-lore in Iceland, which first and foremost seems to reflect a deep yearning for ‘home’ by partly Gaelicised settlers that had reached Iceland via Britain and Ireland, might not be just another expression of the same need that later on would bring forth Icelandic saga literature.

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.
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: North-Western Europe: Scandinavia, Ireland, and the Land of the Living

Chapter 2: The Classical Mediterranean: Rome, Greece, and the Islands of the Blessed

Chapter 3: Eastern Roots?

Chapter 4: Continuity, Interaction – and Westward Expansion?

Appendix: Beyond History

Bibliography

Index

In der bisherigen Forschung ist wiederholt die Frage aufgeworfen worden, ob die Paradiesgefilde des Ódáinsakr und der Glæsisvellir der mittelalterlichen isländischen Mythologie auf keltische Einflüsse zurückgehen, und wie genau diese Einflüsse zu fassen und sozial und historisch einzuordnen sind. Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, arbeitet das Buch die nordischen Zeugnisse vollständig auf; neben literarischen werden dabei auch folkloristische Quellen und archäologische Befunde berücksichtigt. Nach der Analyse dieses Materials wendet sich die Studie dem keltischen Vergleichsmaterial zu: der arthurischen Literatur, der irischen Literatur und antiken keltischen Zeugnissen. Die vergleichende Analyse dieses breit gestreuten Materials zeigt, dass der Ódáinsakr/Glæsisvellir-Komplex in der Tat von keltischen Überlieferungen nicht zu trennen ist. Die unmittelbare Quelle für die zugrundeliegenden Einflüsse ist dabei wohl nicht in der arthurischen Literatur oder gar der keltischen Antike, sondern in der volkssprachlichen Überlieferung des wikingerzeitlichen Irland zu suchen. Von dort scheint der Motivkomplex während der Landnahmezeit nach Island gelangt zu sein.

"Perspektiven aus dem Reich der Toten" nimmt seinen Ausgang von einem Vorschlag, der in der jüngeren religionswissenschaftlichen Forschung vorgebracht wurde: der Religionsästhetik im Rahmen der systematischen Religionswissenschaft die Rolle einer neuen Leitdisziplin zuzuweisen. Anhand einer Detailanalyse des Hypogäums der Volumnier, eines etruskischen Felsengrabs bei Perugia, setzt sich das Buch kritisch mit der Frage auseinander, inwieweit es notwendig ist und welches Potential darin liegen könnte, ein solches Programm auch auf die historische Religionswissenschaft zu übertragen. Dabei wird einerseits deutlich, dass die historische Religionswissenschaft sich in Hinblick auf ihre Profilbildung potentiell ganz ähnlichen Herausforderungen gegenübergestellt sieht, wie sie für die systematische Religionswissenschaft ausgemacht worden sind und dort zum Ruf nach einer neuen Leitdisziplin geführt haben; andererseits zeigt sich jedoch auch, dass die Reichweite der Religionsästhetik in diesem Zusammenhang kritisch zu hinterfragen ist. Anhand einer breiten Kontextualisierung der verschiedenen Jenseitsmotive, die in der Ikonographie des Volumniergrabs aufgegriffen werden, wird daraufhin das Konzept einer überregionalen Religionsgeschichte als ein möglicher Gegenvorschlag zur Religionsästhetik als identitätsstiftender Leitdisziplin der historischen Religionswissenschaft zur Diskussion gestellt. Damit soll eine gleichermaßen vernachlässigte wie produktive Fragestellung wieder stärker ins Bewusstsein der Forschung gerückt werden.

Snæfellsjökull is one of Iceland’s most famous volcanoes. It is there that Jules Verne located the entrance to the centre of the earth; it is the abode of a medieval saga hero and the location of one of Halldór Laxness’s novels. Travellers, painters, poets, and film-makers have been drawn to it in equal measure – while at the same time and against all expectations, others seem unfazed: as famous as the mountain is on a national and international stage, local folklore and medieval historiography have amazingly little interest in it. Clearly, Snæfellsjökull is not the same to everyone.
      This volume presents a survey of the place of Snæfellsjökull in the Icelandic and European imagination. It adapts the paradigm of geocriticism, which shifts the focus of the scholarly investigation from the work of individual authors to the multitude of views that different authors, artists, and practitioners have on a single place. The results of the perambulation of Snæfellsjökull presented here show that both its cultural and literary history, as well as the paradigm of geocriticism, open up broad vistas that amply repay the effort necessary to tackle this mountain.
https://www.utzverlag.de/catalog/book/44855

The rich corpus of literary otherworld journeys that has survived from the Scandinavian - and especially the Icelandic - Middle Ages is in many respects tied to a space 'Between the Worlds'. Every otherworld journey quite literally engages with a space 'between the worlds' in the sense that it plays itself out between this world and a world beyond, an otherworld. Yet this is not all. Also in terms of its cultural context this branch of the literature of the medieval North takes up a position situated midway between a broad range of poles. Texts from the Christian period treat pre-Christian mythology; allegedly pre-Christian material is studded with Christian motifs; Scandinavian texts adapt the learning and literature of the European continent, Ireland, and the classical Mediterranean; and Finnish narratives in turn appear to adapt Scandinavian narrative patterns. The volume presents a rich panorama of a broad range of very different - Scandinavian, Finno-Ugric, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Ancient Near Eastern, and archaeological - perspectives on the topic of the 'otherworld journey', which contextualises the motif of the otherworld journey in Old Norse-Icelandic literature in an unprecedented breadth.

This volume explores the intersection of landscape and myth in the context of north-western Atlantic Europe. From the landscapes of literature to the landscape as a lived environment, and from myths about supernatural beings to tales about the mythical roots of kingship, the contributions gathered here each develop their own take on the meanings behind ‘landscape’ and ‘myth’, and thus provide a broad cross-section of how these widely discussed concepts might be understood.

Arising from papers delivered at the conference Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe, held in Munich in April 2016, the volume draws together a wide selection of material ranging from texts and toponyms to maps and archaeological data, and it uses this diversity in method and material to explore the meaning of these terms in medieval Ireland, Wales, and Iceland. In doing so, it provides a broadly inclusive and yet carefully focused discussion of the inescapable and productive intertwining of landscape and myth.
Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘Landscape’, ‘Myth’, and the North-Western European Perspective – MATTHIAS EGELER

Myth and Real-World Landscapes

Spaces, Places, and Liminality: Marking Out and Meeting the Dead and the Supernatural in Old Nordic Landscapes — TERRY GUNNELL

Aesthetic Appreciation of Landscape in the Sagas of Icelanders — REINHARD HENNIG

Landscape Meditations on Death: The Place-Lore of the Hvanndalur Valley in Northern Iceland — MATTHIAS EGELER

Myth and the Creation of Landscape in Early Medieval Ireland — GREGORY TONER

Codal and Ériu: Feeding the Land of Ireland — GRIGORY BONDARENKO with NINA ZHIVLOVA)

Finn’s Wilderness and Boundary Landforms in Medieval Ireland —ELIZABETH FITZPATRICK

‘Here, Finn… Take This and Give him a Lick of it’: Two Place-Lore Stories about Fi(o)nn Mac Cum(h)aill in Medieval Irish Literature and Modern Oral Tradition — TIZIANA SOVERINO

The Mélusine Legend Type and the Landscape in Insular and Continental Tradition — GREGORY R. DARWIN 

Myth and the Landscapes of Literature

King Sverrir’s Mythic Landscapes — NICOLAS MEYLAN

Mythologizing the Conceptual Landscape: Religion and History in Imago mundi, Image du monde, and Delw y byd — NATALIA PETROVSKAIA

The Road Less Travelled: Cú Chulainn’s Journey to Matrimony and the Dindshenchas of Tochmarc Emire — MARIE-LUISE THEUERKAUF

‘If we settled in the forest…’: Tracing the Function of Wooded Spaces from Old Irish Literature to Contemporary Poetry — EDYTA LEHMANN

Der Band »Germanische Kultorte: Vergleichende, historische und rezeptionsgeschichtliche Zugänge« zieht die Bilanz eines interdisziplinären Symposiums, das im Oktober 2015 am Institut für Nordische Philologie der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München stattfand. Diskutanden aus Nordischer Philologie, Archäologie, Altorientalistik und Religionswissenschaft tauschten sich in diesem Rahmen über unterschiedlichste Aspekte germanischer (und ausgewählter anderer) ›Kultorte‹ aus und deckten dabei ein Spektrum von Fragen ab, das von allgemeinen Problemen der Auseinandersetzung mit ›heiligem Raum‹ über die spezifischen religiösen Räume der germanischen Religionsgeschichte bis hin zu ihrer modernen Rezeption reichte.

In the history of religions, both places and stories play a central role: places are where human religious life plays itself out - 'takes place' - , while telling stories is one of the main ways how human beings communicate about the invisible others that are gods, saints, spirits, and magic powers. This article will discuss how fieldwork-based research can bring both places and stories together. A substantial category of supernatural storytelling consists in narratives that are connected to specific locations in the physical landscape, such as narratives about manifestations of supernatural entities or foundation legends. The article explains how it can be a fruitful approach to such narratives to systematically walk both the sites and the connecting routes between the sites that these stories are associated with. In analogy to the technique of a 'close reading' in the study of literature, a 'close walking' of story places can help to establish their contexts in everyday life, including aspects such as land use, economy, social frames of reference, or topography. Sometimes it can even shed light on the composition of narratives, as lines of sight in the physical topography can interrelate with the motifs used in a story.

Drawing on corpora from West Africa and Iceland, the article presents a fieldwork-based comparative study of the ‘things that place-names do’. Treating toponyms as performative elements that form part of the synchronic workings of culture, we have observed striking parallels (as well as some noteworthy differences) in the uses to which place-names are put in both regions. Place-names communicate spatial orientation, but also play an important role in the commemoration of people and events. Furthermore, they mark claims of possession, support the construction of identity, sacralize the landscape, and serve as means to voice moral reprimands. They can provide entertainment, by, for instance, inscribing ridicule into the land. They may also subvert as well as affirm social hierarchies and political power structures, and even play a role in interethnic conflict. Equally, they can become nuclei of storytelling, providing starting points for the invention of narratives. Showing the range of functions that place-names can assume in two very different geographical contexts, the article illustrates the potential of fieldwork-based approaches to contribute to research on toponyms.

ABSTRACT: The article presents a case study within the recent renaissance of folkloristic approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic religious history and saga literature. It undertakes a comparative analysis of medieval literary and recent local traditions about the burial of Ǫnundr Wooden-Foot, who was the great-grandfather of Grettir the Strong
and an important character in the introductory chapters of Grettis saga. First, the article lays out the different accounts of Ǫnundr’s burial in medieval literature. Second, it contrasts the literary accounts with a broad range of more recent local traditions. Furthermore, it brings the physical topography of Ǫnundr’s alleged burial site into the discussion. The article then uses this ensemble of data to problematise issues such as the relative importance of chronological vs. geographical distance between a narrative and its alleged object, throwing new light on the relevance of recent local traditions for understanding medieval saga accounts.

In this note, I want to propose that sometimes a rather
pedestrian approach to storytelling can greatly help us
to understand the context of and what is going on in folk
narratives. For many such stories, a close reading of the
text can be fruitfully supplemented with a corresponding
‘close walking’ of the locations where the plot of the
narrative plays itself out, and this can help to ground our
understanding of the stories in the everyday contexts
of work and land use that were a given for the people
who originally told the tale. I will develop this thought
on an Icelandic example, but, especially judging from
my experience with Irish literature, I think that it can be
applied also in at least some other cultural contexts.

This article presents a historical ethnography of an imaginary road. Drawing on printed sources, archival material, and new field research, the article analyses the Icelandic folktale of ‘Loss of Men on Heiðarbæjarheiði’ (Manntjónið á Heiðarbæjarheiði), a story of regional importance in the Strandir district of the Icelandic Westfjords, especially the fjord of Steingrímsfjörður. The article shows the shape this story takes when encountered locally, where it appears in the form of minimalist place-storytelling that is actualized in the engagement with particular places. It thus contributes to our understanding of how legends work ‘on the ground’. In this local form as place-storytelling, the narrative shows considerable variation and a strong focus on the interpretation of local place names. Based on the contexts and variation observed between the different variants of the story, this article reads ‘Loss of Men’ as a formulation of collective fears, thereby contributing not only to research on legends, but also to the current discourse on emotions in the humanities more generally.

The whole book is available open access at:
http://kismet.press/portfolio/res-artes-et-religio/
and
https://archive.org/details/res-artes-et-religio-essays-in-honour-of-rudolf-simek-kismet-press
and
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL31993716M/Res_Artes_et_Religio

The article approaches the episode of the death of Svanr of Svanshóll in Njáls saga (ch. 14) through the workflow of coastal fishing before the arrival of modern marine technology. It discusses commonalities between the medieval story and its variants in twentieth-century folklore and proposes that they have a common denominator in being narrative
plays on techniques of orientation in coastal fishing. This both grounds the episode of Njáls saga in processes of everyday labour and, from a methodological point of view, suggests a possible use of folklore for elucidating medieval narratives that can contribute a new angle to the discourse on the relationship between folklore and saga literature.

Keywords: Njáls saga, folklore, Iceland, mountains of the dead, maritime mythology, storytelling and everyday labour.

The depiction of religion, spirituality, and/or the 'supernatural' in travel writing, and more generally interconnections between religion and tourism, form a broad and growing field of research in the study of religions. This contribution presents the first study in this field that tackles tourism in and travel writing about Iceland. Using three contrasting pairs of German and English travelogues from the 1890s, the 1930s, and the 2010s, it illustrates a number of shared trends in the treatment of religion, religious history, and the supernatural in German and English travel writing about Iceland, as well as a shift that happened in recent decades, where the interests of travel writers seem to have undergone a marked change and Iceland appears to have turned from a land of ancient Northern mythology into a country 'where people still believe in elves'. The article tentatively correlates this shift with a change in the Icelandic self-representation, highlights a number of questions arising from both this shift and its seeming correlation with Icelandic strategies of tourism marketing, and notes a number of perspectives in which Iceland can be a highly relevant topic for the research field of religion and tourism.

This article discusses the fundamental fluidity of Icelandic place-lore. It approaches this topic through the example of the settlement of Auðr the Deep-Minded in western Iceland as described by the thirteenth-century 'Book of Settlements' (Landnámabók). I undertake an analysis of this medieval account, which places a central focus on the naming and narrative interpretation of the local landscape of the Hvammsfjörður fjord, with recourse to material preserved in nineteenth-century travel writing, folklore, and toponymy. I then relate my findings to classic perspectives in landscape theory and highlight the extreme ambivalences that become visible in the landscape construction represented by this material if one considers its linguistic minutiae.

Egill Skallagrímsson’s poem Sonatorrek, traditionally held to be composed c. 960 AD and thus perhaps one of the very few genuinely pre-Christian skaldic poems that have been preserved, treats the grief of a father who has lost his son to the sea and his reckoning with the divine powers who have allowed this to happen. The poetic presentation of this emotional struggle repeatedly draws on a stylised imagery of the coastal landscape in which the central tragedy – the drowning of the poet’s son – has occurred. The paper will analyse the poem’s use of this landscape imagery, compare it with attitudes to the landscape that can be grasped through the everyday medium of place-names as well as through Icelandic place-storytelling, and contrast the implications of this comparison with the cosmic character of much of the mythological imagery employed in the poem. This will serve to contextualise the poetic technique of Sonatorrek and show how it harnesses the tension between the cosmic and the everyday as a means of poetic expression.

Ortsnamen können im Kontext gegenwärtiger Debatten, insbesondere zum sog. spatial turn und zur Religionsästhetik, wesentliche Beiträge leisten, sind im religionswissenschaftlichen Fachdiskurs bislang jedoch kaum gewürdigt worden. Der Aufsatz gibt in Form eines Hypothesenkatalogs einen Überblick über zentrale Aspekte des Potentials, das diese Quellengattung hier haben kann: In diachroner Perspektive können Toponyme u. a. als Quellen für historische religiöse Raumordnungen dienen. In synchroner Perspektive spielen sie u. a. als Speicherungsmedium des kulturellen Gedächtnisses eine Rolle bei der Schaffung von Assoziationsräumen und der Vergegenwärtigung und Naturalisierung von religiösen Ordnungen. Sie leisten einen Beitrag zur Schaffung eines Gefühls von Heimat, zu Orientierungsstiftung und zu Kontingenzbewältigung. Zugleich können sie zu Katalysatoren einer Neuerfindung von Traditionen werden, dokumentieren religiöse Pluralismen und stellen Kristallisationspunkte von Konflikten dar.

The contribution analyses how the late medieval Harðar saga uses place-names as literary devices. It proposes that toponyms are employed not only to locate plot elements, but also for purposes of subversion, the dropping of keywords then taken up by the narrative in an often grotesque and ironic fashion, the creation of an (again, typically ironic) subtext, and the evocation of physical topographies and their visual appearance in the context of accounts of travels. Thus, the contribution argues that place-names are a central part of the storyteller's toolkit which can provide important pointers for how to read the saga.

Next to extended narratives as they are presented by Eddic literature, the Sagas of Icelanders, or lives of saints, one of the most important media reflecting medieval Icelandic conceptualizations of and attitudes to the supernatural is the Icelandic landscape, and here especially the toponymy which forms a core element of the ascription of meaning to this landscape. Drawing on the corpus of placenames brought together in the Hauksbók-recension of the Book of Settlements, the article explores an approach to the supernatural in medieval Icelandic culture which differs from previous scholarship by choosing a perspective covering a wider spectrum of the religious cosmos of early Iceland than it had traditionally stood in the centre of research on sacred placenames: it looks beyond questions of pagan cult and the great gods of the North to include the mythological cosmos as a whole, inclusive of beings like giants and trolls, and furthermore it places its focus not specifically on Old Norse paganism, but rather on the interweaving of pagan and Christian elements in Icelandic sacral toponymy. Thus, in short, it attempts to explore not pre-Christian paganism, but the supernatural in Icelandic toponymy, approaching a holistic picture of the supernatural cosmos of medieval Iceland as it is presented to us in the Book of Settlements.

This article discusses the account of the settlement of Þórsnes by Þórólfr Mostrarskegg as it is presented in Eyrbyggja saga, relating it to the question of the applicability of current thinking on landscape to the interpretation of Old Norse literature. While current approaches both to landscape in general and to the construction of the landscape of Þórsnes in Eyrbyggja saga in particular tend to emphasise the function of ‘landscape’ as a medium conveying existential ‘meanings’, a close reading of the literary landscape of Þórsnes in Eyrbyggja saga rather suggests that much of the literary construction of this landscape should be seen as consciously grotesque and intended to be understood as  such by the saga’s contemporary audience. Central for this reading is an interpretation of the place-name Dritsker as meaning “Guano Skerry”. This translation is suggested by the lexical evidence but has been avoided by previous critics, who chose to adapt their interpretations
of the place-name to the story told about it in the saga and thus missed an arguably central clue for the interpretation of the saga episode. Some thoughts are also offered on the reasons for why a thirteenth-century author, perhaps working in the monastery at Helgafell, might have chosen to present the past of this area in a purposefully grotesque fashion.

This paper discusses the relationship between a folk tale about the Dvergasteinn [‘Dwarf-Stone’] on the fjord of  Seyðisfjörður  in  eastern  Iceland  and  the  details  of  the  tale’s  landscape  setting.  It  argues  that  storytelling  for storytelling’s  sake  might  have  been  neglected  in  current theorising  on  the  conceptualisation  and  narrative  use  of
landscape. This, as well as the intensity with which landscape is used in Iceland for the construction of narratives, might also affect the use of place-lore for retrospective approaches.

Drawing on the example of a German section of the Camino de Santiago, the contribution illustrates the potential of an approach which studies ‘religion’ from a landscape perspective. Specifically, it draws on the example of a 6 km stretch between two villages in the foothills of the Alps in Upper Bavaria: Bad Feilnbach and Großholzhausen. Instead of selecting its material along more traditional ‘denominational’ lines, the approach suggested here defines its corpus by using the criterion of physical, visual presence in a geographically defined section of the landscape. Employing such an approach, it becomes apparent that this stretch of the Camino showcases a remarkably broad spectrum of contemporary religion. The breadth of this spectrum shows the potential of a landscape approach to religion, or more generally an approach that focuses on the presence of religion in space. A study of religion from such a spatial perspective can help to get a cross-section of the religious spectrum which highlights the coexistence and interdependence of religious currents that otherwise might have been viewed as largely unrelated or even entirely distinct.

(c) Mediengruppe Oberfranken – Fachverlage GmbH & Co. KG. Diese nicht druckbare Vorschaufassung wurde freundlicherweise zur Verfügung gestellt von der Mediengruppe Oberfranken. Die Vollversionen des Beitrags ist preisgünstig erhätlich auf www.eDidact.de/hdr-online.

Taking its starting point from the current trend towards using Indo-European comparative material for elucidating Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art sites, this article develops an interpretation of the overall iconographic program of the Massleberg Stora Skee rock art panel in Bohuslän, southern Sweden. It focuses on the hunting scene which forms one of the centerpieces of the site and poses the question of how this hunting scene relates to the remaining iconographic elements of the panel, especially the ships and footprints, and to the water flowing over the rock. Using analogies drawn from Old French “Breton lays,” medieval Irish and Welsh literature, and the archaeology of the Hallstatt period (the Strettweg cult wagon), it is possible to develop an interpretation which connects the hunt with the communication between the human world and an “Otherworld” and to show how such an interpretation can tie in with the other iconographic
as well as natural elements of the site. On this basis, the article concludes with a general discussion of the use of typological analogies versus the application of concepts of Indo-European heritage for the analysis of Scandinavian rock art and discusses the wider applicability of the “Otherworld” term as an analytical concept.

Seit dem Jahr 2004 wird im kleinen Fremdenverkehrsort Thale in Sachsen- Anhalt, am Nordostrand des Harzgebirges, der Thalenser Mythenweg gestaltet: Eine stetig wachsende Zahl von Skulpturen, Skulpturenensembles und großformatigen Wandgemälden repräsentiert dort Szenen und Figuren, die von den Gestaltern dieses Skulpturenwegs der germanischen Mythologie zugeschrieben werden.

(c) Mediengruppe Oberfranken – Fachverlage GmbH & Co. KG. Diese nicht druckbare Vorschaufassung wurde freundlicherweise zur Verfügung gestellt von der Mediengruppe Oberfranken. Die Vollversionen des Beitrags ist preisgünstig erhätlich auf www.eDidact.de/hdr-online.

(c) Mediengruppe Oberfranken – Fachverlage GmbH & Co. KG. Diese nicht druckbare Vorschaufassung wurde freundlicherweise zur Verfügung gestellt von der Mediengruppe Oberfranken. Die Vollversionen des Beitrags ist preisgünstig erhätlich auf www.eDidact.de/hdr-online.

(c) Mediengruppe Oberfranken – Fachverlage GmbH & Co. KG. Diese nicht druckbare Vorschaufassung wurde freundlicherweise zur Verfügung gestellt von der Mediengruppe Oberfranken. Die Vollversionen des Beitrags ist preisgünstig erhätlich auf www.eDidact.de/hdr-online.

Contains reviews of Understanding Celtic Religion. Revisiting the Pagan Past. Edited by KATJA RITARI and ALEXANDRA BERGHOLM. New Approaches to Celtic Religion and Mythology. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2015. xiii + 181 pp. £95; and: Ireland’s Immortals. A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. By MARK WILLIAMS. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2016. xxx + 578 pp., 27 illustrations. £29.95

The ground is squelchy, waterlogged. It pulls on your boots. I wonder whether I am just imagining that every step sends a quiver across a few adjacent square metres of watery grass. I also wonder how deep the peat deposit is here, and about the flip-side of this question: how far down do you have to go until you reach ground that is
actually solid? ...