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Iceland: The saga of its history, art, and modern culture
Iceland in March is not Paris in spring.
It’s cold, rainy, and overcast, making one grateful for
the modern inventions of polar fleece and breathable rainwear.
This fact hit home to Laura Cottingham, who traveled there with
three CC friends to pursue her venture grant, and got her thinking,
“How in the world did the earliest Icelandic settlers make it
in such an environment?”
“It’s such an inhospitable place; it’s cold, there’s very little vegetation and a lot of volcanic rock,” said Cottingham. “It’s hard to imagine how tough it would have been coming here in furs and wooden boats.”
An English major with a love for literature, Cottingham read the Icelandic sagas, the ancient folklore detailing the settlement of Iceland, while traveling the country to better understand the stories and whether they were still important to the island’s people today. In the 13th and 14th centuries, descendants of the original Icelandic settlers wrote these stories — family sagas telling of feuds, duels and battles, legal conflicts, love affairs, travels and raids to Norway and the British Isles.
Cottingham spent hours in museums learning about Viking culture, talking to residents in Reykjavik and the countryside, hiking on glaciers and around waterfalls, and sitting in very expensive cafes (a bowl of soup and bread was $13) reading the sagas. She came away from Iceland with an appreciation for the culture, and maybe just a little envy.
“It occurred to me that in the U.S. we don’t have a national folklore like that, a body of literature that tells the story of our history.”