Landscapes between Heaven and Hell in the Old English Guthlac Material

Abstract

Nature and more specifically landscape is a space that humans inhabit and share with others, such as animals and plants as well as other products and features of the earth. Naturally, the relationship between the individual and the physical world is influenced by various factors that are subject to change. In any case, one expects that the experiences humans have in and with the environment are represented in the cultural images of nature that they create. Accordingly, literature functions as a form of artistic expression that conveys attitudes and behaviours towards the natural world.1 The art historian W. J. T. Mitchell argues that landscape can be “a medium of exchange between the human and the natural, the self and the other” while it constitutes at the same time “a natural scene mediated by culture” (Mitchell 5). This means that there is never an experience of nature that is purely sensory or physical; the perception of the landscape is also influenced by the cultural meanings and values that are imprinted on it. These impressions are based on any previous contact with and exposure to nature that is preserved either as