The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland

In the opening to his book, Dale Kedwards describes a school geology trip to Iceland. In one of those quirks of fate, he ended up at Safnahúsið, visiting an exhibition about Iceland's medieval manuscripts. Afterwards, in the gift shop, he picked up copies of Njáls saga and the Poetic Edda. From that point on, there was no looking back, for, as he notes wryly, “These purchases were fatal to my aspirations as a geologist” (p. xii). Yet, as he explains, these interests have come full circle in writing a book about Iceland and its medieval mappae mundi. Indeed, this is a particular strength of what he has produced. The study is impressively interdisciplinary in nature, combining a thorough grounding in Old Norse palaeography, philology, and culture with broader knowledge of scientific processes and phenomena, theories about the world and the cosmos going back to the Classical period, and the transmission of these ideas between cultures over the centuries. It seems that the author's preexisting interests in the study of the earth, its materials, and its processes continued to stand him in good stead, even as he made his way further into the world of Old Norse Studies.The book focuses on five Icelandic mappae mundi (“maps of the world”), drawn between ca. 1225 and ca. 1400 CE. Kedwards aims to situate them in their intellectual, literary, and material contexts in order to demonstrate how they function as “complex registers of Icelandic national self-perception and imagining” (back cover). The first two are hemispherical world maps, preserved in the manuscripts AM 736 I 4to (ca. 1300) and AM 732b 4to (ca. 1300–25). The third is a zonal map from the manuscript GkS 1812 I 4to (1315–ca. 1400), showing the Earth's climatic zones. Kedwards names the last two maps the “larger Viðey map” and the “smaller Viðey map,” both from GkS 1812 III, 4to (ca. 1225–50). The former contains 104 legends including the names of the three continents (Asia, Africa, Europe), rivers, seas, mountains, places, and peoples, with a further thirty-two legends that designate cosmological concepts. On the next page of the manuscript, the latter is a smaller, simpler affair, a T–O map with the names of the three continents.Kedwards begins by cautioning against interpreting the maps as windows onto histories of “geography” and “cosmology,” since, as he points out, these are “modern analytical categories that did not exist as distinct or separate disciplines in the European Middle Ages” (p. 5). Instead, if we want to see the maps as their medieval viewers would have done, Kedwards urges us to “loosen their association with geography in the narrowest sense, and realise that the relationship between them is subtler than is generally supposed” (pp. 5–6). Indeed, as he later concludes, these maps “engage Icelandic understandings of mundus that resonate variously with world, Earth, and globe” (p. 179). Knowledge of world geography, history, and the cosmos itself are visualized in these medieval maps, together with the Icelanders’ ideas of their origins and their place in the grand scheme of things.Throughout his analysis, Kedwards urges readers to place the maps in their broader manuscript contexts, rather than as “individual objects of attention, meant to be inspected in isolation” (p. 62). Indeed, over the course of the book, the importance of allowing these mappae mundi to “interact with their companion texts and images” (p. 62) becomes abundantly clear. And in taking this approach, Kedwards moves seamlessly between the micro and the macro, his discussions ranging from the minutiae of Icelandic manuscript production all the way up to the movements of the heavenly bodies.Kedwards carefully takes his readers through the specifics of medieval Icelandic history, society, identity, and geographical location. Through these details, he is able to show that “the Icelandic mappae mundi are pioneering works of Icelandic historical writing that show how Icelandic thinkers were able to manipulate cartographic space to address contemporary anxieties about the place of Iceland in Scandinavia, and attendant questions of Icelandic history and identity” (p. 9). As Kedwards argues, this is partly why it is so important to look at these maps in their broader manuscript contexts, since these combinations of maps, texts, and images “form composite statements about Icelandic history and society, and relate more broadly to the Icelanders’ literary output at this time” (p. 21).Thule, which in some maps appears as Iceland's northern twin, is highlighted as an example of the Icelanders’ worldview and self-image. As Kedwards explains, Thule may have provided the opportunity for the mapmaker to extend Iceland's history “into Classical antiquity to negotiate Icelandic anxieties about the island as a terra nova, and, like other Europeans, demonstrate their culture's centralist origins” (pp. 140–41). Likewise, in his analysis of the Icelandic zonal map, Kedwards is able to show how Iceland's northerly position enabled its inhabitants to understand and experience global concepts that had only been theorized in the Classical world. He notes that, “On the hemispherical and zonal maps, Icelanders saw the cold northern regions they had recently discovered and settled as an integral and stable part of the world described by ancient authoritative authors” (p. 180). Elsewhere, in the final chapter, Kedwards considers a list of Icelandic priests’ names that accompany the two “Viðey maps,” dated to 1143 and attributed to the historian Ari inn fróði (“the wise”). As he notes, “In bringing these items together, the map-maker juxtaposes a vision of global geography and an image of the Icelandic Commonwealth attributed to its preeminent historian” (p. 149).The Icelanders had a keen sense of their own place in the wider world and were well aware of the broader implications of their geographical location. At the same time, Kedwards presents the medieval Icelanders as outward-looking participants in a contemporary, pan-European geographical discourse. Indeed, he is keen to stress that “Icelanders were not latecomers to cartographic production, but fared with their English and Continental contemporaries in thinking about the wider world and their place within it” (p. 102). He makes the point that “Icelandic maps neither engage passively with inherited ideas, nor move through the culture that produced them without changing it” (p. 102). Moreover, “Icelanders may have borrowed from, rewritten, or made occasional forays into European culture, but seldom are they recognised as Europeans writing European literature. What we see in the maps, however, is not so much a comingling of Icelandic and European cultures as Icelanders making the case for their own innate Europeanness” (pp. 182–83).One of the great strengths of this book is how Kedwards is able to shift gear multiple times, often over the course of a single paragraph. He has to describe complex phenomena to nonspecialists—not least planetary kinematics, tidal processes, and disparities between lunisolar and ecclesiastical calendars—explaining them not only according to our own modern scientific knowledge but also according to how they were understood in the European Middle Ages and the Classical era before that. And underpinning it all is his impressively firm grounding in Old Norse palaeography and philology. The result is smooth, readable, and engaging, but like a duck gliding over the water there is plenty of powerful legwork beneath.Beyond the field of Old Norse Studies, this is a book with the potential to open up the mappae mundi of Iceland to those working in a wide range of disciplines. Kedwards included an extensive appendix in which the maps are reproduced photographically together with texts and translations. The appendix makes for an impressive source book, the sort of resource that makes the subject matter available to a far wider range of scholars than would normally access this material, drawn from across the disciplines and linguistic traditions.While on the subject of photographic reproductions, I had a slight quibble over the cover design. While I understand the logic of featuring relevant images from the English Cotton map on the front cover (MS. Cotton Tiberius B.V., f. 56v, ca. 1050), it seemed a lost opportunity not to visually foreground the Icelandic mappae mundi of the book title. Granted, from the point of view of a graphic designer, medieval Icelandic manuscripts might seem a little brown and grubby compared to some of their more flamboyant cousins from the British Isles and the Continent. Even so, the impression is that they weren't quite good enough to feature on the front cover of their own full-length study. The danger is that this might reinforce the idea of the medieval Icelandic maps as being mere shadows of their non-Icelandic counterparts, and somewhat lesser for it, whereas, in fact, Kedwards makes the powerful argument that this is not the case at all.Kedwards might have been lost to the field of geology that fateful day in 2004, but what that discipline lost, Old Norse Studies gained. Though in reality, no one really lost, because as Kedwards demonstrates so convincingly, everything threads and loops together, all contributing to our understanding of the world, the universe, and humanity both past and present.