In Iceland's Networked Society, Tara Carter examines how Viking Age Iceland, despite being positioned at the margins of competing empires, achieved social complexity on its own terms by successfully ...managing ties to key players in a global social network.
Iceland, Greenland, Northern Norway, and the Faroe Islands lie on the edges of Western Europe, in an area long portrayed by travelers as remote and exotic - its nature harsh, its people reclusive. ...Since the middle of the eighteenth century, however, this marginalized region has gradually become part of modern Europe, a transformation that is narrated in Karen Oslund'sIceland Imagined.
This cultural and environmental history sweeps across the dramatic North Atlantic landscape, exploring its unusual geography, saga narratives, language, culture, and politics, and analyzing its emergence as a distinctive and symbolic part of Europe. The earliest visions of a wild frontier, filled with dangerous and unpredictable inhabitants, eventually gave way to images of beautiful, well-managed lands, inhabited by simple but virtuous people living close to nature.
This transformation was accomplished by state-sponsored natural histories of Iceland which explained that the monsters described in medieval and Renaissance travel accounts did not really exist, and by artists who painted the Icelandic landscapes to reflect their fertile and regulated qualities. Literary scholars and linguists who came to Iceland and Greenland in the nineteenth century related the stories and the languages of the "wild North" to those of their home countries.
This book examines Europeanization in the European Economic Area (EEA), exploring whether non-member states can have an input into EU decision-making and whether the EU can successfully export its ...policies within the framework of the EEA.
Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, while not EU member states, are members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and signatories of the EEA Agreement. The Agreement allows participation in the EU's internal market but also requires extensive and continuous adaptation to EU rules. Whilst existing literature is limited mainly to the EU's impact on its own member states or neighbours to the east, this book extends the study of Europeanization to the EEA, exploring whether Iceland, as a non-member state, can have an input into EU decision-making and, conversely, whether the EU can ensure that its policies are adhered to outside of its borders. The author argues that, although the EEA Agreement is not without its challenges, it has proved considerably more resilient than originally expected. This raises the question of whether the EEA provides a realistic alternative to EU membership for other states with close ties to the EU.
Delving into the largely unknown intersection between the EU and the EEA and providing important new insights into the Europeanization process, Europeanization and the European Economic Area will be of strong interest to students and scholars of European Union politics and policy-making, European Union Enlargement, Nordic politics and comparative politics.
Wasteland with words Magnusson, SigurA(deg)ur Gylfi
2010., 2010, 2012-02-01
eBook
A comprehensive, detailed social history of Iceland, which explores the evolution and transformation of Icelandic culture, as well as the economic crisis that almost brought down the global economy.
This book examines to what extent politics in Iceland have been transformed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The book focuses on whether the short-term sudden shock caused by the Great ...Recession has permanently transformed politics, political behaviour and the Icelandic party system or whether its effect was primarily transitory. These questions remain highly relevant to the wider field of political science, as the book examines under what circumstances sudden shocks lead to permanent changes in a political system. As such, the book situates the post-crisis Icelandic case both temporally and comparatively and evaluates to what extent the Iceland experience is reflective of broader patterns found in other Western democracies, particularly those other countries that were also hard hit by the Great Recession (e.g. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy). This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of Nordic politics, Icelandic politics and society, electoral studies, political parties and party systems, representative democracy, political behaviour and more broadly to European and comparative politics.
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""To a faithful friend, straight are the roads and short.""-Odin, from theHavamal(c. 1000)
Friendship was the most important social bond in Iceland and Norway during the Viking Age and the early ...Middle Ages. Far more significantly than kinship ties, it defined relations between chieftains, and between chieftains and householders. InViking Friendship, Jon Vidar Sigurdsson explores the various ways in which friendship tied Icelandic and Norwegian societies together, its role in power struggles and ending conflicts, and how it shaped religious beliefs and practices both before and after the introduction of Christianity.
Drawing on a wide range of Icelandic sagas and other sources, Sigurdsson details how loyalties between friends were established and maintained. The key elements of Viking friendship, he shows, were protection and generosity, which was most often expressed through gift giving and feasting. In a society without institutions that could guarantee support and security, these were crucial means of structuring mutual assistance. As a political force, friendship was essential in the decentralized Free State period in Iceland's history (from its settlement about 800 until it came under Norwegian control in the years 1262-1264) as local chieftains vied for power and peace. In Norway, where authority was more centralized, kings attempted to use friendship to secure the loyalty of their subjects.
The strong reciprocal demands of Viking friendship also informed the relationship that individuals had both with the Old Norse gods and, after 1000, with Christianity's God and saints. Addressing such other aspects as the possibility of friendship between women and the relationship between friendship and kinship, Sigurdsson concludes by tracing the decline of friendship as the fundamental social bond in Iceland as a consequence of Norwegian rule.
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Into the ocean Ahronson, Kristjan
Into the ocean,
2015, 20150225, 2015, 2014, 2015-02-25, 2015-02-26, Letnik:
8, 8.
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That Gaelic monasticism flourished in the early medieval period is well established. The "Irish School" penetrated large areas of Europe and contemporary authors describe North Atlantic travels and ...settlements. Across Scotland and beyond, Celtic-speaking communities spread into the wild and windswept north, marking hundreds of Atlantic settlements with carved and rock-cut sculpture. They were followed in the Viking Age by Scandinavians who dominated the Atlantic waters and settled the Atlantic rim.
WithInto the Ocean, Kristján Ahronson makes two dramatic claims: that there were people in Iceland almost a century before Viking settlers first arrived c. AD 870, and that there was a tangible relationship between the early Christian "Irish" communities of the Atlantic zone and the Scandinavians who followed them.
Ahronson uses archaeological, paleoecological, and literary evidence to support his claims, analysing evidence ranging frompapplace names in the Scottish islands to volcanic airfall in Iceland. An interdisciplinary analysis of a subject that has intrigued scholars for generations,Into the Oceanwill challenge the assumptions of anyone interested in the Atlantic branch of the Celtic world.
This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Iceland contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on important ...personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.
Dragons, giants, and the monsters of learned discourse are rarely encountered in the Sagas of Icelanders, and therefore, the general teratological focus on physical monstrosity yields only limited ...results when applied to them. This, however, does not equal an absence of monstrosity – it only means that monstrosity is conceived of differently. This book shifts the view of monstrosity from the physical to the social, accounting for the unique social circumstances presented in the Íslendingasögur and demonstrating how closely interwoven the social and the monstrous are in this genre. Employing literary and cultural theory as well as anthropological and historical approaches, it reads the monsters of the Íslendingasögur in their literary and socio-cultural context, demonstrating that they are not distractions from feud and conflict, but that they are in fact an intrinsic part of the genre's re-imagining of the past for the needs of the present.
In the present work, we applied the use of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) - a quadcopter - and the Aerial Structure from Motion digital photogrammetry image processing technique (ASfM) to study ...volcano-tectonics and tectonic features in an active Icelandic rift. Data have been collected in order to evaluate the Holocene deformation in the Northern Volcanic Zone of Iceland. We mapped 397 structures, mainly related to extension fractures and subordinately normal faults in the Theistareykir Fissure Swarm, obtaining 1098 and 21 structural data, respectively. This allowed to reconstruct an overall spreading direction of N108° during Holocene times, and to calculate a stretch of 1.013 regarding 8–10 ka old lava units. Deformation in the area is related to both dyke intrusions and extensional tectonics. Furthermore, detailed geological-structural field and UAV surveys were also performed in two test areas in order to determine data accuracy and the associated reliability of this approach. In addition to the above, different flight heights were tested, suggesting that photo collection with a 12.4 MPx camera at 100 m is efficient to study fracture dilation and kinematics.
•We studied Holocene deformations in Iceland's Northern Volcanic Zone.•Extension fractures were studied by UAV and field surveys.•We defined the geometry of 397 fractures and collected about 1119 structural data.•The overall spreading direction of the area was N108° during the Holocene.•We suggest an appropriate flight height for surveying extension fractures.
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