Iceland’s attempted industrialisation through an expansion of hydropower and aluminium smelters can lead to a significant reshaping of the country’s landscapes. There has been considerable resistance against such plans since the 1970s, culminating in the debate about the Kárahnjúkar project between 2001 and 2006. The book Draumalandið. Sjálfshjálparbók handa hræddri þjóð [Dreamland. A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation] by the writer Andri Snær Magnason has been particularly influential. It combines ecological consciousness with an appreciation of Iceland‘s literary tradition and history. Thus it displays a view of landscape which connects nature preservation closely to cultural achievements and to national sovereignty. This perception of landscape originates from the assumption that Iceland experienced a golden age from the beginning of colonisation in the Viking age until the subordination under the Norwegian and later Danish kings in the 13th century, which led to an all-embracing degeneration. Nationalist poets such as Jónas Hallgrímsson in the 19th century based their demands for independence on Iceland‘s medieval saga literature and the country‘s landscapes. These seemed to provide evidence for a high culture in unity with nature during the time of the Commonwealth. Although the historical reliability of the sagas is doubtful, they are still used as an important argument in Draumalandið. Now the narratives as such are put in the foreground, as they can give value and meaning to the landscapes and places they describe. Thus a turn from a realistic to a more constructivist perception of landscape can be observed in contemporary Icelandic environmental literature.
Can medieval Scandinavian literary texts tell us anything about the environmental conditions and the availability of natural resources in premodern times? This essay discusses some of the challenges of reconstructing past environments based on texts that make heavy use of genre conventions and literary devices such as symbolism, metaphor, and allegory. Environmental scarcity and abundance play an important role in both the Sagas of Icelanders and the Bishops' Sagas. Although the descriptions are not entirely historically accurate, they can shed valuable light on the ways humans of the past have perceived and dealt with problems of scarcity and environmental change.
Cultural criticism since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s time is usually characterized by a triadic structure: (1) It criticizes its own present. (2) It refers to a reconstructed, idealized past. (3) It searches for alternatives in order to create a better future. This structure has also been characteristic of most environmentalist narratives since the ‘ecological turn’ around 1970. At this time, the future seemed still to be open, so that solutions to environmen-tal problems would be achievable in time. Today, however, the insight that irreversible, human-induced environmental change on a geological scale has already taken place – that the Holocene has ended and we are now living in the ‘Anthropocene’ – fundamentally challenges the triadic structure of both environmentalist fiction and nonfiction. Based on recent examples from literature and film, I will therefore illustrate how the Anthropocene and its implications change not only environmental consciousness as a whole, but also contemporary environmentalist narratives.