This volume offers many thoughtful studies of the fundamental connection between landscape and myth. By chance or design, it does not actually focus on all the lands of North-Western Europe, but rather on two cultures that certainly have produced an exceptional number of landscape-related legends myth, and lore: Ireland and Iceland. These places serve as the twin poles of this edited volume, with approximately the same number of contributions devoted to each, with a few related outliers: Wales and France. The editor, Mattias Egeler, is right to point out the deep "interconnections between Old Norse-Icelandic culture and the cultures of Britain and Ireland" (12) as a justification for putting these two geographical areas under scrutiny in the volume. He also points out many examples of cultural borrowing between Ireland and Iceland, such as several of Thor's adventures: the revivification of the goats looks a lot like "the Christian saint Germanus in Historia Brittonum (Chap. 32), a ninth-century text from Wales" (13) and his visit to Útgarđa-Lóki and the feast in the Otherworld hall has many Celtic analogues (14).
The volume is the result of what must have been a fruitful interdisciplinary conference in Munich on April 6-8, 2016. It is therefore cohesive in its thematic focus, with contributions grouped by the editor into logical parts with subcategories. Matthias Egeler's editorial introduction is a gem of the genre, offering not only a helpful overview of the threads of conversation that tie the volume together, but also an intellectually engaged exploration of the state of the field. This reader found particularly helpful his interrogation of the semantic and methodological valences of the two concepts under discussion in this volume, "landscape" and "myth," both of which work differently in different contexts for different scholarly projects. Egeler does not impose one definition of these two key words--rather he offers a good synthesis of the possible uses of the concepts and then allows each contributor to define her own parameters and methodology. This introductory discussion helps one orient to the current state of scholarship. The volume is of use to anyone interested in myth or landscape, and offers a kaleidoscopic approach to the subject. It is, of course, especially useful to Celticists and scholars of medieval Scandinavia.
The first half of the volume is divided into two section, the Old Norse-Icelandic and the Celtic material, both halves engaged with "aspects of the relationship between myth and real-world landscapes" (16). Nordic contributions include: an exploration of the liminal spaces in Old Nordic landscapes of the dead such as grave mounds (Terry Gunnell); a revisiting of the debate about whether or not Icelanders conceived of their landscape as an object of aesthetic appreciation (our contributor, Reinhard Hennig, says, controversially, no, they did not--the supposedly aesthetic moments simply note abundant resources); and Matthias Egeler's fascinating study of the place lore related to Hvanndalur Valley in Iceland, which sees it as a place of eternal (if logistically problematic) life, whose functions and topography may owe something to the Irish "Island of the Living" (75). All three provide different methodological approaches to the lived Nordic landscape.
The second part of the first half explores myth and "real-world landscape" in Ireland (primarily). Gregory Toner's chapter discusses multiple early medieval landscape narratives to shed light one early Irish understanding of their landforms and their creation, showing that these stories imbued "the landscape with meaning far beyond the surface geography (80), while Grigory Bondarenko examines the Dindshenchas story of Codal and Ériu, and finds traces of "a cosmogonic myth where a child-goddess is fed with the sacrificial food, made from the contents of codal (skin, hide), and when grown up feeds the gods while the whole land of Ireland is manifested as her own body" (108). Elizabeth FitzPatrick follows the link between the mythical/legendary Finn mac Cumaill with specific boundary landforms, while Tiziana Soverino discusses his link with Ballyleague and "The Steps" at Cullentragh. Finally, Gregory R. Darwin shows how Latin, Welsh, Old French, and Irish Mélusine legend associates that fairy with specific landscapes that have been marked by family dynasties.
Moving away from solid ground, the second half of the volume explores literary landscapes and their enlacement with myth. We find no schematic separation of Celtic and Norse strands here. Here too the contributions are rich, and useful to any scholar interested in the subject. Nicholas Meylan discusses the author of Sverris Saga's use of landscape to legitimize the rule of king Sverrir; "the land is granted a more than human voice, which it uses to authorize an individual's claim to power, thus literally naturalizing his pretention to rule" (191). Natalia I. Petrovskaia explores the Latin, Old French, and Welsh versions of Imago Mundi, noting that the vernacular Old French and Welsh versions of the Latin text made changes to the texts' descriptions of places like France and the Middle East based on their own geographical knowledge and cultural biases. This contribution is an outlier in several ways but is certainly fascinating in its own right, especially in its hypothesis that the French version reflects contemporary anxieties about Mongol expansion in the 1230s and 1240s (206). Marie-Luise Theuerkauf offers a convincing argument about the purpose of the riddling landscape lore in the Tochmarc Emire, showing convincingly that Cú Chullainn and Emer, the lovers-to-be, are signaling their supernatural ancestry with their allusions to landforms, and thus forming a marriage that brings together the Fomorians and the Túatha Dé Dannan. Finally, Edyta Lehman examines both medieval and contemporary Irish nature poetry featuring woodland, thus showing the continuity of the Irish poetic conception of the power and mystery of forested landscape, and thus concludes the volume by ushering us away from these mythic traces, and back into our own troubled century.
This reader commends the contributors and editor for producing a volume that is well-organized, well-conceived, and well-researched, is a useful contribution to studies of landscape in the medieval North-Atlantic region, and is worthy of a space on many library shelves.