National History, Resistance, and Cultural Enclosure in Iceland’s Bell
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7823399 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christinna Hazzard (0000-0002-1511-7135, Liverpool John Moores University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 1-20 |
| Publication date | 2024-11-11 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369801x.2024.2401527 |
| OpenAlex | W4404246082 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
Iceland offers a combination of spectacular natural beauty and Viking history that has made it a popular destination for tourists. The island, which has a population of under 350,000, was visited by almost 700,000 tourists in 2021, according to the Icelandic Tourist Board, and tourism accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the country’s total export revenue (OECD). The island’s Viking heritage, recorded in the medieval sagas and eddas, is central to Icelandic cultural and national identity and has played an important role in attracting tourists. However, the history of the saga manuscripts as material cultural artefacts is also tied to Iceland’s history as a Danish colony. They were originally collected and stored in Copenhagen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and only partly returned to Iceland in 1971, almost two decades after Iceland gained independence from Denmark. The history of the saga texts is the subject of Halldór Laxness’s novel Iceland’s Bell, published in three volumes from 1943 to 1946 at the height of the Icelandic independence movement. Through a discussion of the novel, this essay will show that the Icelandic sagas, both as tangible and intangible cultural artefacts, are central to Laxness’s articulation of a cultural nationalism that is resistant to Danish colonial domination. It will suggest that not only is Iceland’s Bell a novel concerned with the material history of the sagas, but that this history is intricately linked with the island’s seven centuries of colonial domination by the Kingdom of Denmark. It is thus a consciously anti-colonial novel that portrays the violence, in both cultural and material terms, of Danish rule in Iceland and aligns cultural enclosure with colonial domination
Biology · Enclosure · Environmental ethics · Telecommunications · Engineering · European Socioeconomic and Political Studies · History · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |