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Reviewed by:
  • Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe ed. by Matthias Egeler
  • Jay Johnston
Egeler, Matthias, ed., Landscape and Myth in North-Western Europe (Borders, Boundaries, Landscape), Turnhout, Brepols, 2019; hardback; pp. viii, 263; 18 b/w illustrations, 3 b/w tables R R.P. €70.00; ISBN 9782503580401.

An edited collection of twelve chapters plus introduction, this volume is the second published in the relatively new and promising series, Borders, Boundaries, Landscape, edited by Eleanor R. Barraclough (it follows Savborg and Bek-Pederson, eds, Spiritual Encounters in Old Norse Literature and Tradition, 2018). [End Page 203] As is common with edited collections, the standard of scholarship is variable. So too, the remit, focus, and length of individual chapters. Like a gift box of Christmas chocolates, there are insightful, perfectly formed delights to be savoured, and a few faux pineapple flavours with distinctly less appeal. Between the satisfying and the fruity, sublime range a host of agreeable, if not entirely edifying, fare. Despite the editor’s best intentions there is limited dialogue between the chapters: each remains a sweet unto itself.

As the title appropriately signposts, three themes ostensibly draw these chapters together: myth, landscape, and the region of ‘north-western Europe’. Matthias Egeler works hard in the Introduction to provide a cohesive narrative to link these themes with the collected chapters. At a superficial level, there is no doubt that each does have as its focus an aspect of myth and landscape from the denoted region. However, this surface level is simply not enough upon which to build critical incursions in the field. Myth and landscape are delightfully troubling terms: they are not universal or self-evident concepts. Egeler makes this entirely apparent in his useful Introduction, which canvasses many of the interpretations and critical applications of both terms. I would advise that this is an introduction not to be skipped and I commend his choice of topic/s and spirit of interdisciplinary engagement. Nonetheless, the degree to which individual authors engaged critically with these conceptual lynchpins varies greatly. This is not simply the case of differing interpretation and application of key concepts— that is a delight of the themed collection form—but rather, an inconsistency in the acknowledgment of the unstable meaning of key terms from chapter to chapter. Similarly, another dominant theme that ran untroubled through many chapters was that of wild vs domestic/cultured place and the boundaries which maintain such distinctions. Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, in her analysis of hilltop cairns as boundary monuments (Chapter 6), does subject the concept of wilderness to critical scrutiny, but for many others such designations were deployed as ‘given’. Many opportunities were missed for teasing out and problematizing key categories and their construction.

The most problematic conceptual issue in the volume is also the source of its great richness: myth. This not only pertains to what the term encompasses for individual authors, but the way in which it appears to invite forms of universal speculation. There are moments of this less robust association in the volume, for example, in cases where very detailed and specific analysis of text or vernacular beliefs about a specific location are suddenly designated as correlates with traditions from cultures and times vastly different. These ‘other’ cultural examples often deployed as short ‘tab-on’ at chapter end. Most only undermine the rigour of the preceding analysis. The erasure of cultural difference in this style of associated mapping is of significant ethical concern.

Egler structures the volume in two sections: (i) Myth and Real-World Landscapes, and (ii) Myth and Landscapes of Literature. This organization is not seamless; given their content, many chapters could slip over the designated section [End Page 204] borders. Indeed, most of the case studies could usefully disrupt the maintenance of the binary between ‘real’ and ‘literary’ landscapes and/or ‘real’ and ‘folk-belief’ inscribed places. Highlights of the first section include Terry Gunnell’s exploration of ‘sitting out’ as ritual practice for obtaining ‘mystical knowledge’ in relation to grave mounds, particularly a pre-Christian mound from Litlu-Ketilsstaðir (northwest Iceland); Egeler’s own chapter on the place-lore of Hvandalur Valler (northern Iceland) and Fitzpatrick’s exploration of ‘Finn’s Wilderness...

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